> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons
This to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't count the amount of times I've heard men how much they would worry if they'd be getting a daughter. It seems as if many people think a girl has to be parented differently - probably more intensely - compared to a boy who can apparently be left to his own devices more often.
Do you have children? They most definitely need to be parented differently.
With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being.
I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
> I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
I would speculate it affects it in different ways. Social media puts young boys at risk of entering highly misogynistic spaces, the damage of which will be borne out on the bodies, careers, and wellbeing of women they meet later.
I think people without sons may seriously underestimate the ingenuity, energy, and frequency with which boy toddlers attempt to kill, maim, or otherwise seriously injure themselves.
Even moreso with multiple sons close in age. Thinking about the trouble my brothers and I caused on our own versus in groups versus all together, there seems to be a superlinear growth in the amount of trouble a group of boys can cause.
Ha! I tried to explain this to parents who have only daughters. They would offer advice like "you need to give them more projects to do or you need to listen more to them." They would look on with a judging attitude as my sons would tear around playgrounds looking for sticks and rocks to arm their fort. Or they would play on the "outside" of playground structures. Imagine a 15 foot tall covered slide. They would climb on the outside of the slide - risking a serious fall.
I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents.
It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
I think there is a strong selection bias there as well, there's significant research showing how girls and boys are treated differently when getting into "dangerous" situations. It's been my experience as a father of 2 girls that they also love to climb on the outside of playground structures.
However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave".
That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
ye it is pretty f up how girls are treated. everything must be pink, all the toys are dolls, wear dresses and have long hair which make it harder to play. plus adults are much more friendly to girls. it all starts then.
Not just themselves, but those around them as well. The only defense is that they usually telegraph their headbutts, if you keep your eyes on them when they're within striking distance.
> With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being.
Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy.
I definitely didn’t mean to discount the emotional damage done to boys by social media and media. Also the damage done to them by caging them up in schools while demanding absolute obedience and attention in “lord of the flies” situations.
If anything, that makes me think that we need to give more emotional attention and care to boys, since they're less likely to seek help (even if the method for seeking help is destructive).
A female friend of mine who worked at a psychiatric clinic for a while told me years ago that most suicide attempts are really just attempts of getting attention / cries for help. Choosing a less effective method is likely pretty deliberate.
Yes, but arguably the person that wants to actually really kill themselves as effectively as possible is less ok than someone crying out for help and deliberately choosing "suicide" methods that are much less likely to actually end in death.
Statistically, if you are a parent with a child that is not emotionally OK, a son is more likely to kill himself, which is not reversible / recoverable. So at least while those stats remain true, the idea that girls need more emotional support is not backed up by the evidence I'm looking at.
Statistically, the best thing I can do there is to keep him away from guns and to not have them in household. That really works, then he has only less fatal means available to him.
Then of course there are things like treating him as normal multidimensional human as opposed to as emotionless competing machine as people in these HN theads write about boys. Like, the boys I know in real life are way more multifaceted people, they do have emotions and everything. They have relationship issues with regards to their friends. They do have to deal with bullying from their friends both physical and emotional. When young, they are not walking constantly fighting trouble people in this discussion describe. When teenagers, they are not only-cares-about sport and violent games kind of guys. Nor closes himself to his room and ignores the family which is actually supposed to be cool thing about boys kind of guys.
Reading gender sterotypes on HN about boys, one would believe it is impossible for boy to become artist, writer, scientist or philosopher. Except in real world, boys and men engage in all those. But really, median boy that live in my bubble is not destructive machine. There are few boys that do cause disproportional trouble, but majority of them are nice humans.
Back to girls, I would be careful to trust people who find all these attempts to "not be serious" at the time of trying. Majority of them is serious. People who act like they are not serious or just cry for attention that needs to be ignored are how girls dont get help they need.
I think most people chiming in here (me included) are just sharing anecdotes about their experiencing raising their children.
Destruction is a normal part of adolescent behavior. I think many first time parents are just really surprised to see it manifest so strongly in their children, especially toddlers.
I don't know what you mean as normal adolescent destruction. My brother was not destructive nor were my friends. Adolescent sons of my colleagues are not destructive. I know that troubled teens exists, but I also know that many of them are actually decent people.
Most toddler destruction is cluelessness and the same toddler is sad and compassionate in other situations. Physically active toddler boys are noisy which is tiring, but they are also sweet and trying their best.
And all of that is irrelevant to effect from article, which manifest only in immigrant fathers and first born female child. And the effect is small.
So the divorce effect is likely way more about clash between cultural expectations of foreign born dads then about how horrible either boys or girls are.
I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures.
I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not.
There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women.
Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures.
I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along."
Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed.
Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career.
This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.
Women face plenty of challenges, but to belittle the things men face by cherrypicking what they "bitch" about does very little to gather understanding from men to women's challenges. It is incredibly dismissive to the essence of the problem from a father's perspective.
Additionally, this is a very anecdotal example which doesn't explain why reports are found as early as prepubescent girls. Reports stating girls on average do indeed feel more pressure from social media than boys do.
>having kids and the threat of potentially having kids
undermines female income on a regular basis
The only reason you see it this way is because of your previous point regarding women and children being a "package deal". There are societal expectations of men who have children.
>women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development
This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children". It's specialization and symbiosis. Women can benefit from "supporting" their husband's career. Ideally people support EACHOTHER in a relationship, and that includes tradeoffs in many areas of life, financial/career/societal/emotional/children.
>cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot
What a revelation. You're right, if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create. /sarcasm
That's maybe half a step away from a personal attack. That's not "my opinion." That's how society tends to treat things and that observation is based on lots of reading of stuff with solid studies behind it.
This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children".
No, it's not. Not at all. For one thing, two people can be married and have their own children separately from a previous relationship.
if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create.
Give me a break. This is not a position I am a proponent of. I rarely talk about the so-called "patriarchy." I do not advocate an idea that sexism is rooted in men being intentionally malicious assholes and I don't think I ever have.
This is not a good faith engagement of the point at all.
The fact that women can have babies tends to impact the lives of all women, whether they want babies or not. They get a lot of social expectations hung on them that are rooted in the idea of father as breadwinner and mother as full-time parent in part because that's a model that is more reliable than mother as breadwinner and father as full-time parent.
By reliable, I mean it tends to withstand things going wrong that you can statistically bet on happening in some percentage of cases. Pregnancy can really seriously impact a woman's body and health in a way that becoming a father doesn't do to a man's body.
As just one really minor example, she can be incontinent for a time after the birth and need to account for that, which is tougher to deal with if you have a paid job than if you are a homemaker.
The idea of "women have it tougher than men" is naive and toxic. You can try to justify it by saying that your ideas are "based on lots of reading of stuff", but it's obvious you are only interested in how this topic relates to your own ego.
Women go through it in birth, I have never met a person who didn't acknowledge that birth is an absolutely painful and sometimes devastating process that is unique to women. Women die giving birth too. Should men feel ashamed for that? Maybe we should pass a law that makes it illegal to get a woman pregnant... After all she might die and if that happens then the evil man who impregnated her should be punished, right?
Oh wait, nobody understands that only women get pregnant, so I guess that's the first hurdle here. HEY EVERYBODY, ONLY WOMEN CAN GET PREGNANT! Maybe that should be the next study: "Human beings with two X chromosomes are 100% more likely to get pregnant than those with XY chromosomes".
>women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development //
Isn't the effect that one would use to support this, the same effect one sees if instead "women prefer to look after their children than immediately return to full-time work after child-birth"?
It seems that in Western democracies often women may [amongst other options] choose their own career vs. support a husband to enable greater closeness with children. Men seldom have that option.
Aside: "> and have her pick up after him": Father's who get no veto on abortion, or pregnancy get to live with the mother's choice. Sure, they share responsibility for the pregnancy too, but twisting that situation to (what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work' is going to need some hard proof if you're going to convince me that this isn't unwarranted sexism. I think you'll find men "bitch" about it because they're denied any say but are expected to pay because "a man's role is to work".
Isn't the effect that one would use to support this, the same effect one sees if instead "women prefer to look after their children than immediately return to full-time work after child-birth"?
No. Well before there are children, women will fairly often do things like follow her husband or boyfriend to a new city when he gets a job offer there. When a person moves to a new city because they got a job offer there, they tend to be getting a promotion and a pay raise.
When a person moves to a new city to follow someone else and then start their own job hunt, they tend to be hurting their career and will typically get a less prestigious job with less pay than what they left. Do that sort of thing often enough along gendered lines and the cumulative effect is pretty harsh.
(what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work'
Please don't do this. It's hard enough to participate here as a woman without someone intentionally twisting my comment in such an ugly manner.
It takes two people to create a baby. There is a long human history of placing various expectations on both men and women to account for that reality. The expectations related to that are long and varied and tend to be gendered, such as expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men.
The reason for expecting virginity for girls is it's a form of birth control and it's the only one that's really reliable and it wasn't that long ago it was the only one a lot of people really had ready access to.
One college, I think in the UK somewhere, used to give scholarships to "virgin girls" and their test historically was "a girl who had never been pregnant." They had to update their criteria at some point.
The last time I saw data on it, a "normal, healthy fertile woman" was defined as a woman who would get pregnant within a year if she was sexually active and not using protection.
Someone asked explicitly for "a personal perspective" and I gave some of that. The degree to which I am being given crap for having done that is quite aggravating.
You don't have to care what a woman thinks, but I give a woman's take here from time to time simply because this is an overwhelmingly male space and I post as openly female. Sometimes, that goes okay. Sometimes, it's appreciated and respected, but it's never an easy thing to do and it always opens me up to being given a ridiculous amount of crap for making a good faith statement.
It never matters how carefully I word it, someone will inevitably have a problem with a woman daring to give the female side of the equation here.
It always sucks when a baby is conceived that wasn't actively and intentionally wanted and planned by both parties. This is part of why there is so much societal baggage concerning human sexual stuff and why the entire world wants to be judgy about things like how many people you sleep with, did you do it before marriage, is it a serious relationship or a casual one and on and on and on.
That's not because women are awful bitches to men and it's not because men are awful bastards to women. It's because when 1 + 1 suddenly and unexpectedly = 3, that impacts many lives, not just the two poor fools who bumped uglies one night without thinking too much about it (as just one scenario -- I'm well aware there can be others).
I'm already finding this discussion amazingly tiresome on a day when I already feel incredibly raw about men being assholes to me, so I think I probably need to walk away. It's really, really hard to constantly be expected to be the one who worries about the feelings of nine zillion men on this forum while it sometimes seems like not a single soul gives a damn about me, my feelings, my life, my welfare -- anything.
So if people want to just downvote my comments to hel...
> Well before there are children, women will fairly often do things like follow her husband or boyfriend //
And vice-versa, do you feel there's some sexually skewed pressure here? Sadly for me I was the one who got a job first, so I won the chance to be stuck in a little box every day, yay!
> expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men //
In the UK I think if you interviewed 10000 people you might get one that thinks that; honestly I've heard a lot of strange views but never anyone expressing virginity as a virtue only for women, it's always been for both sexes. I've no idea what you're leading towards or where you're getting this idea (assuming we're still talking Western Democracies)?
> It never matters how carefully I word it //
I hesitated to post that because you're one of the first people with a gendered name I've noticed, I don't notice many but overwhelmingly they're asexual names (temporal, rsync, whatever) and I've found your comments high value and definitely adding to the site in general. But, what did you mean there then, I couldn't work out a way in which it wasn't a terrible caricature.
You're complaining here about mistreatment, but you're dishing it too. You don't have to care about anyone's feelings to present your perspective - I don't know if you're getting downvoted, but ultimately it's fake internet points. Make your point ... but if you do it in a way that denigrates every divorced male then I think you've got to expect push-back.
> I can still count on getting openly hated on //
Disagreement ain't hate. I appreciate your posts, doesn't mean I don't disagree with some of their content.
> Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
I'm worried about this trend too. I saw an ad the other day that started with talking about how much time and effort women need to spend on beauty etc. My thought while watching this part was "This is horrible, we should encourage less of this."
But instead of this conclusion, the ad concluded with "If women have to put this much effort in, men should step up and start putting in more effort. Here's a product we make so men can put in more effort." I found it absurd!
My wife quips the same (wanted a girl, had a boy, wife is Chinese, I’m American), though I think it’s more about how much work is involved in having one kid let alone two.
Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.
I’ve known a few Indian women who suggested I would be disappointed if I had girls. I never had the courage to ask I if they hated their own existence or something.
>with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost
That's likely an unintended side effect of the change in western attitudes on integration, going from "conform" to "melting pot" and now to "cultural stew". The pressure to adapt to the new country's values is less than it used to be while it is also encouraged for cultural communities to form and persist. Beyond that, the revolution in cheap global communications likely as plays a role, as cultural values can be reinforced in the new country from the source country. It may be that the only way to change the attitudes towards gender in the Canadian-Indian community will be to change those attitudes in India itself. That of course gets us into the messy territory of cultural imperialism.
Wait, how are they able to do this? Do they selectively abort on sex determination? I suppose sex determination isn't illegal in North America like it is in South Asia.
I have an Indian-american friend. His sisters were allowed to marry whomever they wanted, but his parents nearly disowned him when he married a white non-Hindu, since it was his sole responsibility to carry on the family. Years later his mom still will not talk to his wife.
I think a large part of the thinking (at least subconciously) is that if a son gets in a stupid relationship and gets someone pregnant, it's not nearly as big of an impact on his life as it is to the daughter who got in a stupid relationship and got pregnant.
I have two sons, three daughters, and I was one of those who said I was terrified of having a daughter and how much I would worry.
It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection).
I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.
> most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection).
Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
Presumably, but considering the fact that we're programmed to care more about our family than the rest of the world, it's unlikely he'll be as worried about the situation he's described than the opposite.
This is the opposite of what I teach my sons about men and women. The truth is, women are every bit as capable of being shitheads as men. Gender plays zero role in a person’s capacity to empathize, be trustworthy, and love. I think we set men up for failure when we encourage them to put women on a pedestal. There’s the risk they do that and don’t get the results they’re after and develop a strong bias against women—all because they’ve been misinformed their whole life about gender roles and behavior.
I think GP is saying women face greater risk than men in dating and society. (I’m using man/woman here instead of male/female as the former seems less clinical)
I honestly wonder at this and prefer to not take a stance as I have too little information. Watching some reflections from transgender people after their transitions may help. I’ve heard female to male trans report society treating men with much less care. Meanwhile I imagine women get a lot more engagement from society than men.
I believe that's because of (the scare of) pregnancy and the certainty that the baby ends up in the mother's hands wether or not there's a willing let alone capable father.
My friend who have constant problems with his teen girl and no with boy is exactly that case. He constantly takes issues with her make up - but had her in dancing group from childhood where makeup is basically required. Constant issues with interpreting her cloth sexually - while she did not understood that yet.
Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.
Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage? So not 100% the most helpful thing to measure.
My parents and the parents of some of my depressed friends are not divorced, simply because divorce requires communication and a willingness to reflect upon the state of your marriage openly.
As I said, I might be biased, but I think the hidden outcome of "not legally, but emotionally divorced" makes up a significant portion of turbulent marriages.
While true — in addition to your point about remarriage, I’ve met a couple who legally split because same sex marriage didn’t exist at the time and one of them was trans — you should probably show the frequency rather than existence of such groups.
There’s a huge difference between single mom with a baby daddy that ran away, and a shared custody agreement between two people who are both in the picture. “Single mom” stories and statistics are usually about the former. I’m not sure how much worse the latter is compared to a two parent household
Having lived many years in both a miserable, acrimonious two parent household, and a post-divorce situation - my personal opinion is the latter is, unintuitively, far more harmful long term for the kids. But the former is so much worse for the parents that I don’t think it’s worth it to, say, stay together until they leave the nest. If that were possible without total loss of sanity, I think it would be better. But the divorce was decidedly not amicable so I don’t know what that’s like.
Right, so if I interpret you correctly, you were in the situation of living with two parents in a bad relationship, and the divorce added additional stress of having two different houses, visitation/custody complexity, and possibly additional fights between the parents about those issues.
So the alternative of having one home and more access to both parents could be better for the child even if the parents don't get along with each other well.
That is exactly what I mean, yes. If both parents sincerely want what’s best for the kids, that should take priority and thus the bar should be accordingly high for divorce until the kids are grown, whatever you feel grown means. Higher than the parents just wanting to “live their best life”.
As I recall, I didn’t take my parents’ daily fighting, even my mom screaming and throwing things, as much to heart as some might think. I’m glad you used the word access because that’s precisely what I valued most, and the biggest loss. Second to that was the devastating financial strain (2 apartments, 2 cars, etc but same income).
I will second this sentiment as I grew up in a very similar situation, extremely unhealthy two-parent relationships that left me with some really bad memories and then a vicious divorce between two people who hate each other. Often children are used as weapons against the divorced spouse in this situation which adds significant stress in growing up. At least when the parents are together the children can't be used as proxy wars.
If you could measure what would have happened if parents stayed together then yes. But parents break up for a reason, and trying to put that back together makes zero sense. In the US, a large minority of single parents have fathers who have spent time in jail...is it a good idea to put a child into that environment? Probably not.
And the main issue with single parents is income/income instability (which is why there are focused benefits in many countries for single parents). As ever, an income issue gets classed as something else.
> In the US, a large minority of single parents have fathers who have spent time in jail...is it a good idea to put a child into that environment?
Very well could be a good idea. If the father was in jail because of some youthful drug offenses, it could very well be that he could still be a devoted and loving parent and no danger whatsoever to the child.
I disagree. There are two ends to a marriage that I am aware of — death and divorce.
Suppose the marriage was one of mental and physical abuse, but ends in death. I think it may have been healthier for that particular marriage to end in divorce.
Why not? Sometimes things just don’t work out. It’s obviously worse than staying together and being happy about it, but it’s a sunk cost fallacy to think you should always repair your marriage instead of finding a new partner.
> repair your marriage instead of finding a new partner.
There are two ways to think about this.
The first is that once your car gets too broken to repair, you should just ditch it and get a new one.
The other is that once your arm/ankle/hip/liver has problems, you should just transplant a new one instead of doing physical therapy/exercise/eating healthier/drinking less.
In my experience, marriage is much closer to the latter situation than the former.
This analogy would work better if organ transplants, prosthetics, etc. weren't a real thing and the medically right answer in many cases. If your hip needs replacement, no amount of eating healthier will cause it to no longer need replacement.
There are, of course, many situations where divorce is not the right answer for that situation, just like there are many situations for which a hip replacement is not the right answer. But it is within the set of potential right answers across all situations. There's no sense in trying to replace what is easily repairable, and there's also no sense in spending your life trying to repair what needs to be replaced.
And it's totally possible to go through life where neither you nor anyone you know ought to get a divorce - just like it's totally possible to go through life knowing nobody who needs a hip replacement, but that is hardly evidence that the procedure is the wrong answer for everyone!
The analogy works even better because organ transplants are sometimes necessary and sometimes not. Although GP started off defining a binary, I don't think they are thinking in black and white. A charitable reading of the GP implies the nuances you express.
I like this metaphor because it fits with the generation of my parents!
That's also the generation of people who don't go to the hospital because anything hurts. They go to the hospital 5 years later for something unrelated, when it's discovered it's 4 years too late to do anything about it.
Doesn't matter which situation is closer, they're both nothing like a marriage. There are more than 2 ways to think about it. If marriages are like a car, then there's also the option to ditch it and not get a new one. If it's like a critical body part, someone is way too dependent. Also, those relationship advice books focus on minor issues, not one where someone isn't willing to change, and certainly not willing to read a book like that, and instead demands the other just "love them for who they are".
What about a situation where one party wants to make it work and the other doesn't?
In your example, your ankle is under your control - if you want to exercise it, you can. Your ankle doesn't actively sabotage your body (or if it does spread infection/etc, amputation is often used).
A marriage depends on two people working together to build a life together. If one person is not willing to put in that effort, the marriage fails.
Because marriage is intended as an act of lifetime committent to what is seen as a positive relationship, and so failing this original intent can never be a measure of success.. Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'.
The oaths made in a typical marriage are impossible, dangerous ideals that, once made, can guilt people into sticking to bad situations.
Bad people don't tend to go around being bad unless they think they can get away with it. Once someone has pinky swore to dedicate their life to them, no matter what they might do, the true colors come out. I've seen it too many times, the idea does more harm than good.
Life-long good marriages exists, I hope to achieve one myself, but the silly oath doesn't help them in any way, and it makes the bad ones worse.
"Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'. "
Impossible was a poor word choice. I meant like no one could honestly make the promises, because no one can predict how people and situations will change over a life time.
Maybe if the oaths contained an "unless you become an asshole" clause, they'd be more valuable.
Thanks - I specifically worded this as generically as possible precisely to avoid getting into 'fairy tale' definitions, but yet, people are happy to reverse-project their own values onto a neutral statement to attack the some strawman in their heads.
> For most of history marriage was property transfer,
Failing to see how this debunks either 'lifetime committment' or 'positive relationship' which are the only logical assertions I made - I did not attempt to qualify how to ascertain 'positive'; financial benefit can also be construed as 'positive'.
That’s not how divorce works. It’s not an end if you have kids. It’s the beginning of something different. But you’re still tied together. So now you have twice the expenses, half the time with the kids who now need you more than ever, more reason to fight with each other, and possibly even more resentment, all compounded by your own personal feelings of loss and failure. Yay, what a win for everyone involved.
Also, realize that people don’t generally get to a divorce by talking things out and figuring divorce is the only option. Even if they do talk things out it’s usually only after divorce is inevitable.
Divorce is the healthy end to a failed marriage. The unhealthy thing in a marriage is it being failed, and we use divorce as a proxy for that (although not all failed marriages have ended or ended in divorce).
Marriages aren't supposed to end except in death. It's right there in the vows. They are a serious commitment, and I think many take them lightly without realizing that they are intended to be lifelong.
No, marriage in America is based on Christian theology and by extension so is the legal framework around it, which is why divorce is so difficult. That's factual, not emotional.
Marriage is based on whatever the humans in the marriage want it to be based on. The legal system is constantly evolving in 50 stages. Your understanding of the legal system lacks nuance, probably because you are repeating something you heard a partisan say.
I'm referring to marriage as a legal contract, and legal stuff changes slowly. It was certainly founded on religious principles, which is why homosexuals couldn't marry until recently. I'm not advocating for that state of affairs, nor repeating what some partisan said. Were we to green-field re-do marriage today, divorce would be a whole lot easier and possibly more of an expectation.
It would be useful for me that I have some way to assign certain rights relating to me, to someone else.
I am not married, but I have been living with someone for 12 years, and neither of us has plans to change.
But legally, I don't know what happens when one of us meets a misfortune and the other needs to speak for us. Luckily in our case, we both have plenty of other blood relatives all alive and reachable and all on good terms with each other.
So, if say I am incapacitated, and some functionary at a hospital won't accept my partners decision about what to do, both my partner and the functionary can reach several other generally accepted proxies in the form of my mother, my brother, and even more cousins. My partner will be able to say what to do only slightly indirectly if not directly.
And we both have our own jobs with insurance and retirement savings so neither of us really needs to be legally acknowledged to receive benefits like military death benefits or retirements etc.
So for us we can pretty much get away with having NOT addressed these issues.
But they are real issues that generally should be addressed. A legal document on the books would provide a clean path to resolve a lot of potentially messy situations. What if our families didn't all like or respect each other? What if one or both of us had no known and/or reachable bood relatives? What if one of us actually needed to be recognized as a claimant on the others insurance or retirement or property like a house?
Probably a lot of such things could just as well be handled with legal documents other than marriages. Like if I take a job that has spouse insurance benefits, that could just as well be whoever I want to write on that form, rather than having it be determined by my marriage document.
But it would still be useful to have a catch-all document that expresses my wishes in any situation not handled elsewhere.
>Marriages aren't supposed to end except in death.
Says who? Every country I've lived in has provisions for ending marriages, so clearly it's not the only path.
>It's right there in the vows.
What vows? Nobody in my family is religious, none of us made any claims about being together until death. And even then, lots of religions allow for divorce, even some sects of Christianity...
Do civil unions have the same “benefits” of marriage? If not there should be.
I think the distinction should be socio-cultural: if you don’t accept that this civil union is “till death do us part”, then by definition it shouldn’t be marriage - it’s a civil union. All the same benefits of marriage with none of the cultural components.
Good points. The state shouldn't be in it at all, because calling it marriage can be an infringement on the religious liberties of others. Civil unions are the state-sanctioned "legal pairing of two humans", and marriages are the religious term for civil unions - and come with religious expectations.
The state shouldn't be in the business of certifying christenings or bar mitzvahs, nor should it be in the business of marriage for the same exact reasons.
Marriage is one of a very few things in life humans undertake where they are asked to commit to do something “for life” that they have never done before. And their closest vantage point is likely their parents’ marriage.
I think it’s not so much people take it lightly, as that they have no idea of what they are getting into and what kind of work a modern marriage involves.
It is amazing to me that people can consider entering into a lifelong contract with a partner and not have discussed 5, 10, 20 year goals. Seems like a common sense due diligence thing to do.
More than that - when my now fiancee proposed to me I was completely surprised by it, and literally couldn't process the question for a good couple of minutes. Thankfully she decided to leave me to it for that time and by the time she got back I accepted, but it occurred to me that a proposal is itself the only time you're asked to make a life-changing decision by surprise, and answer it there and then without being able to spend any time considering what the correct decision is.
Are you religious per chance? Not denigrating, but civil marriages (not sure if right name) don't have any of these vows, for health and sick whatnot.
I am divorced, and got married in my country outside the church. Wether we like it or not, it was literally a contract. An officer of the court was there, read the 'contract' which states our data, the legal parts of it (prenup, how assets were after marriage, etc), and the legal responsibilities. There was nothing there about 'until the end' or the likes.
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, and I am from a very catholic country, but most people don't realize that marriage is the contract that is governed by the government's law and not any vows or whatever the priest says in church. It is a contract and parties to that contract are allowed to change their mind and divorce (break contract).
Fixed term marriages are becoming popular in Australia and other places and have historical precedents. It is likely a lifelong term of marriage may be unrealistic with our comparative ease of survival.
I’d be careful to suggest it has so much to do with “real factors” like relative safety to ease of survival and more with cultural effects. We see this observationally as subsets of the US have lifelong marriage rates in the 90%s, specifically religious communities.
I don’t recall the exact numbers but even just considering how many sexual partners people have can drastically change average likelihood of eventually divorce - with virgin couples above 80% AFAIK (some overlap with religious communities likely). Even a few decades ago when survival was still pretty easy marriage had higher success rates.
The culture probably has a lot more to do with the rate of successful marriages than our safety or lifespan
Of course it's healthy for both individuals in a marriage to get out of that marriage they're unhappy in. Is this really up for debate, considering the wealth of examples?
If two people are unhappy with each other, then they should do whatever they want -- stay, go, who cares?
But parents aren't just two people. Life outcomes for the children of divorced parents are significantly worse than for children whose parents remain together.
The first question here is philosophical. I disagree with you as strongly as I could possibly disagree with you about anything. But it's ultimately philosophy and there's nothing much else I can say about it. (Well, beyond the obvious arithmetic, I guess. They are quite literally not just two people any longer.)
But as for the life outcomes of divorced children? That's quantifiable and the data simply disagree with you.
There is no shortage of screwed up kids from continuously married parents (or stable kids from divorced families). Divorce is like measuring the effect of radiation, rather than the cause. The issues that lead to divorce are the problems that mostly screw up kids, not just the divorce itself.
"The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and Children" (Amato & Irving, 2005), even has in it's introduction:
"Available research suggests that these associations are partly spurious (due to selection effects) and partly due to the stress associated with marital disruption."
Of course everything you've said is true. Nobody critical of divorce is saying, "it's the literal divorce that's bad for kids and as long as you just stay together and change none of the behaviors that lead to divorce, then that's better than getting a divorce."
But on the other hand, upper-middle-class Hacker Newsers who got divorced because they were "unfulfilled" probably shouldn't point to extreme cases of abuse and neglect to justify their decision, either.
All things being equal, people in this latter category should try to work it out. (Nobody disputes that there are extreme environments for which divorce is the only option.)
Finally, as always, we are talking about averages. Sociology doesn't have a proof-by-counterexample. If I say, "poverty leads to worse outcomes for kids" it's not a legitimate response to say, "there are some wealthy kids who do bad and some poor kids who do well, so you're wrong."
[0] argues that there is a differential impact of divorce on the children depending on the type of family they come from. You can divide families into two broad groups – high-functioning and low-functioning. High-functioning families, the parents may be unhappy, but they try hard to hide their unhappiness from their children, and the children may have no idea the parents have any marital issues. Low-functioning families, the children are very-well aware of their parents' unhappiness, they witness constant fighting, even abuse and domestic violence. Children from low-functioning families often experience their parents' divorce as a relief, and can even benefit from it. Children from high-functioning families, their experience of their parents' divorce is often much more negative.
So divorce is the healthy way to end a chronically unhappy marriage, yes. But surely we would agree that a happy marriage is healthier. This is a bit like saying that a pneumonectomy is a healthy end to one’s relationship with one’s lung.
Divorce is merely the end of the business relationship of a marriage, not necessarily a social end to the relationship. It should be as healthy as ending any other business relationship.
Not an ideal ending, as it negates the fundamental promises of the marital contract. However, it's two peoples' (plus kids maybe) lives at stake. Staying together in a dysfunctional marriage can damage all those lives (with downstream repercussions on even more people). In those circumstances, a divorce can lead to much healthier outcomes.
In those cases, is the tragedy that the marriage ended, or would the tragedy be if it remained?
> How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?
No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.
I think the original comment was referring to divorce being a better outcome in a failed relationship. There are a lot of failed relationships that continue to raise their kids in a disfunctional way and that is not good. A couple who divorces and are on good terms afterwards when raisig their children is way healthier.
Here is a more fun question: What is the optimal reproductive strategy that also maximizes the chance that the children also reproduce? I will add as an established fact that daughters has a higher base chance of reproductive success than sons, but sons have higher base variance.
Game theory should always be asked when biology is involved. I am not sure myself on the answer, but it seems more plausible than the article's "teenage girls are annoying" theory or the speculated "son preference" theory. If there is an optimal strategy, such a strategy may result in a small biological effect which makes parents look for a new chance of reproduction once the majority of child investment is done, resulting in the statistical data that shows 20.12% becoming 20.48%.
Maybe not? It doesn't much matter if you have a lot of offspring, if the offspring don't survive and reproduce. It's an optimization problem of having enough offspring and being able to ensure that they survive to adulthood.
The key is to apply the strategy of the cookoo bird and have others care for your offspring out of their own interest.
I remembered a case of of a obstetrician impregnating multiple patients but a Google search(1) easily proved this was not an isolated case as the first few links are all separate incidents.
As immoral as this strategy sounds I admit it is probably the most effective strategy from an investment/returns pov. It is cheaper than becoming Genghis Khan(2) and the effect is comparable.
The only people who can historically get away with that are high status men (less so women, since child bearing is intrinsically metabolically and temporally expensive). Globally/long run, it's not a great strategy, certainly not compatible with modern ideas of liberty.
If that would be true then there would not exist any pair bonding species, and there is some excellent benefits from it. Two parents mean one backup while raising the children, and two parents is double the parenting. Two parents also give some potential benefits with twins, something which pair bonding species tend to have a lot of while non-pair bonding species don't. The primary argument in favor of pair-bonding is that having a lot of offspring that don't reproduce is worse than having a few that do.
Humans with our great variations of behaviors has both pair bonding behavior and non-pair bonding behavior, with genes that code for both. If one strategy was always superior to the other then we would have settled for it a long time ago.
(Its a law or something when talking about genes that the behavior is always a gene-enivorment interaction, and there are likely many more factors that influence pair bonding behavior).
"R-selectors" have many offspring, investing fairly litle in each one. K-selectors have a few offspring, but invest a lot of time/resources in caring for each. There's a bit more to it than that--and the theory has needed some adjustment, but...
A divorce is a much more healthy end to an abusive marriage than the other options. Your blanket statement "divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage" is patently false.
I'm not saying divorce can't be bad. I'm saying that it's not inherently an unhealthy end to a marriage, because there exist clean divorces and nasty marriages.
It is a healthy end, if the couple wasn't right from the beginning or if they became different people.
It's unfair to expect two humans to remain compatible their entire lives. We evolve massively. A person i would have married at 18 is not the same i'd marry now.
Which isn't to say that difficulty should be met with break ups. Rather, it's to say that some marriages should end. Both parties would be better off. Other marriages would be better served to have problems met, worked through, and the couple made stronger as a result.
Marriage is about growing and adapting with the other person. "We changed" as a reason for the end of a marriage is an admission of failure to work at the relationship over its course. Of course you changed. The whole point is to grow and change together, until you die.
People don't just become incompatible. Something went badly wrong for that to happen. It's increasingly common nowadays - nuclear families tend to be more atomized, rather than integrated into an extended family, which increases the stress on the relationship, and many people simply don't prioritize their marriage, but instead their career, kids, or lifestyle. And of course, the modern social environment is more full of distractions and temptations than ever.
If the assumption is that the only source of change is internal to the relationship, sure. There are many sources of change that are external to two partners in a marriage, it’s not unreasonable to think one person may diverge from another to the point where a having a healthy, close, intimate relationship is unhealthy.
It is precisely my point that these 'external' sources of change are nowadays one of the main problems and entirely foreseeable in advance.
For example, if one or both of them prioritize their careers over their marriage, and spend no more than an hour or two a day even in the other's presence, let alone quality time, for years on end, because they're busy at work or with something else...it's entirely predictable that they grow apart. That was the failure. They chose economics or the corporate ladder or an app that's changing the world or...over their marriage.
> The whole point is to grow and change together, until you die.
To you. But not so for many people, i imagine. I think the rate of divorce in America would suggest otherwise. Not to say that those are all healthy individuals, but that description sounds like a very religious-centric outlook on an often secular behavior.
In this framing, i'd argue that the liability of marriage should be thought of as "until death", but still. Sometimes the person you become is not something to be accepted nor desired by your loved ones. So who is to blame?
Do you change who you are? Or does your loved one change what they love? Sometimes both are unfair questions.
I think the way the commenter worded it, it sounded like they thought a couple just entering into marriage might sit down and talk about the healthiest outcomes of their marriage and say: "Well, we could stay deeply in love for the next 50 years, or we could get divorced tomorrow. Either way, both equally good options." But that's probably not what they meant.
Agreed. I can’t believe what a massive cultural shift I’m witnessing. Divorce is in no way shape or form a “healthy end” to a marriage. The point of marriage is that it doesn’t end. It is a lifelong commitment.
I agree. Also not to get too autobiographical, but life was much easier for me and my siblings after divorce than having to deal with constant fights. Divorce can be a positive outcome, especially if it can be done amicably.
You’re emotionally tying yourself to Christian theology and claiming it as universal.
If most people married just to have children and raise them, then divorced, that doesn’t seem bad in the slightest, especially given that’s the likely the original motivating force behind marriage anyway.
People tend to associate single-parenthood as source of many problems based on statistics. But I wonder if those are simply correlation and not causation. i.e. people with certain traits are more prone to get divorced, and it could be those traits, and not divorce itself causes most other issues in their children. But it's easier to measure divorce rates than personality traits.
> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
I don't know much about the other ones but segfault is definitely healthier than a buggy program being allowed to write at address 0 or continuing arithmetics after division by 0.
Hah, I remember reading a comment a while back about a HFT firm. The guys there wanted to use Java but couldn't deal with GC latency spikes, so they just bought a ton of ram, turned off the GC, and re-booted the servers every day.
>> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
You're messing up your shades of gray. Being better than financial ruin isn't enough to qualify as a healthy outcome. "Healthy" includes a swath of outcomes, but it's not wide enough to include bankruptcy.
> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
I remember when Firefox's crash recovery got so good, and its normal shutdown process took so long, that someone suggested that it should just crash when the user hit the exit button.
Not the healthiest of outcomes but could be healthier than others.
Kind of like saying the most healthy outcome is getting fired or rage quitting. It could be but once you found the job you signed a contract for life for, retiring is the healthiest outcome.
The parent didn't say "most healthy", they said "pretty healthy". I think we all agree that the "most healthy" outcome is to be happy and fulfilled as a couple forever.
> Kind of like saying the most healthy outcome is getting fired or rage quitting
I don't agree, a closer analogy (keeping in mind that all analogies have limits) would be to say that a _pretty_ good outcome to taking a job is to quit. Which doesn't seem particularly controversial, there's plenty of situations where quitting is a perfectly reasonable and healthy choice, even if you don't have an abusive relationship with your workplace.
I think it depends.
Financially, if you're a man, no. Most family law courts favor women.
Relationship-wise, if you're a woman, no. Odds are if you're getting divorced as a woman past her 30s, it'll be harder for you to find a partner as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband). Especially if you're a single mother. High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids.
So, imo, divorce can be so lose-lose unless the man and woman are both past 50s. At that point, the kids are grown up and both partners are hopefully financially secure without the need of one another.
> High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids
Generally I agree. There are exceptions, especially if the biological father is totally out of the equation. A friend married a woman who already had a kid. Father had vanished, had no interest. He legally adopted the kid, and they had several more together, he considers them all as his own.
> it'll be harder for you to find a partner as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband)
I feel like we just went back in time 80 years. No, women don't need to spend their 20's finding a husband. They can have also go to school, volunteer, have friends, start a career. You know - the things men can do.
> High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids
What does this even mean? Let me guess - you are a high-quality man?
This isn't a gender thing. Just because you don't agree, the GP's comment isn't any less valid. Part of that is culture and malleable, part is just biological facts (being an old parent just sucks). Most Men spend their 20s thinking about finding a wife, too.
I think you're reading way too much into that comment.
It's generally considered a fact that women have a slightly (statistically) more difficult time than men to find a partner after their 20s (and the reverse is true - men have it tougher in their 20s compared to women), and GP's comment is discussing why that complicates things wrt divorce.
> Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.
I think that "high quality" means that they don't want to be second best to another man/woman. Totally understandable.
> Notice that the comment never mentioned that men shouldn't divorce because they are past their 20s when they should be finding a wife.
> Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.
> GP's comment is less valid because it is from an era where women were less-than.
In what world do you live in where on average older women are considered more desirable partners than older men? By and large men are attracted to looks (or they prioritize looks a lot more than other qualities) while women are attracted to a set of qualities besides looks (or they prioritize other qualities a lot more than looks).
You can argue that's sexist and old-fashioned, but that's just how attraction works. Good luck changing the world!
> This isn't a gender thing. [...] (being an old parent just sucks) [...] //
There is a deal of sex-based difference here: being an older mother is harmful for the mother and the child; being an older father is far, far, less so (older fathers might be better for their kids?). Young women can choose a mate from all ages of men. Young men need to choose a mate -- if they wish to procreate I mean -- from the pool of fertile and healthy younger women. Medical science has eroded a little of that difference, but it still starts to get dangerous for women to fall pregnant in their late-30s.
An example of how that difference plays out is that in a childless couple at age 50 the woman basically has no chance to have children of her own, but the male could quite reasonably be expected to be fertile for a couple more decades. Thus, if a couple are unable to procreate and the male wishes to do so, then there is a tension; a biological impetus towards them leaving their wife and finding another partner.
> No, women don't need to spend their 20's finding a husband. They can have also go to school, volunteer, have friends, start a career. You know - the things men can do.
Nothing in GP's comment suggests ~that women should spend their twenties finding a husband~ (EDIT: I missed that sentence in the original comment), nor that they shouldn't do the things you just mentioned.
I don't understand how this is in any way apropos.
> Nothing in GP's comment suggests that women should spend their twenties finding a husband, nor that they shouldn't do the things you just mentioned.
That is in fact exactly what the comment seems to suggest, in these lines.
> as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband
room500's response was exactly what I had in mind too, when I was reading the parent comment.
It very much feels like the GP had something specific in mind for "high-quality" that insinuates that caring for someone else's children is not a high quality thing to do.
I believe that quality is not what they are showing when they focus the comment on what women "should be doing", or if they're still seeing it as "someone else's kids".
I must have missed the statement in parentheses the first time I read it (I honestly don't remember it being there before, apologies), so I retract the part on what GP said about "should". However, I maintain that the comment doesn't say anything about whether women shouldn't do the things the other person said; there's no implication one way or the other in the original comment and most people do both.
On the matter of kids and "high quality", I made no comment on that earlier, and I make no comment now.
Men can have kids well into their 50’s. If a girl wastes her 20s on the carousel, by the time she’s in her 30’s, her reproductive opportunities are starting to dwindle.
Women’s attractiveness starts declining in her late 20’s much faster than it does for men. We shouldn’t pretend like it doesn’t, and pretend like we don’t understand why women in their 30’s can’t find Mr. Right.
Hard disagree on the statement "High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids" based on my experience with an amazing step father and a father who himself has been an excellent step father.
I might even venture to say that having the heart to care well for children who are not genetically your own is part of being a high quality man.
I assume it was meant to be a probabilistic statement, where the probability of finding a man who is economically resourceful and has the desired capacity and abilities to raise children, and is also willing to raise step children is so low as to be a material risk for women looking for said man.
Based on the actions of my male friends and accounts I’ve read about dating as a single mom in their 30s, I assume the above is true.
Your comment about high quality men is way off the mark. Fathers of other men’s offspring are among the highest quality men. Who wouldn’t want to review their potential child before committing?
That's like saying isn't death a healthy outcome for a cancer patient? Sure, it's what happens to many people that get cancer. But getting cancer in the first place is not "healthy", and so death caused by cancer is not "healthy".
If marriage is nothing more than a legal contract - which sadly for many people it is, then why even bother making vows such as "until death do us part"? All for show? Why not just put a time-clause for when the contract expires so that you can decide whether to sign a new one? A highly utilitarian, and in my opinion, tragically sad view of marriage, but that is essentially what it has become for many people.
> That's like saying isn't death a healthy outcome for a cancer patient?
The end of a marriage (where both participants continue living) and a cancer death, are not comparable.
Your "if you're not going to stay in a bad marriage until you physically die, what's the point of marriage?" viewpoint where marriage is permanent xor utilitarian is a false dichotomy.
Divorce doesn't mean that the participants failed, or that they entered into the marriage simply out of utility.
> No one gets married anticipating or wanting a divorce.
I think the existence of reasonable precautions such as prenuptial agreements indicates that this statement is false: many people enter into a marriage with the full knowledge that it may end before the death of one of the partners (presumably contrary to their desire at the time). I think that counts as "anticipating".
Heinlein put it well: "We always marry strangers."
I think the existence of reasonable precautions such as prenuptial agreements indicates that this statement is false: many people enter into a marriage with the full knowledge that it may end before the death of one of the partners (presumably contrary to their desire at the time). I think that counts as "anticipating".
Only 5% of all married couples in the United States got married with a prenup. The fact that signing a prenup is so completely in everyone's interest and the fact that only 5% of marriages have them proves my point - no one is anticipating or looking forward to their own divorce.
Heinlein put it well: "We always marry strangers."
He was married 3 times. I'd be willing to bet he had 2 of those divorces behind him when he wrote that.
> The fact that signing a prenup is so completely in everyone's interest and the fact that only 5% of marriages have them proves my point - no one is anticipating or looking forward to their own divorce.
When my spouse and I got married, we had basically no assets of note. (Drafting and) Signing a prenup would have been in the interest of our lawyers, but not our interest.
Technically it would be a failed marriage. That doesn't mean the people involved are themselves 'failures'.
Many enter marriages very optimistically and with a limited view of what it will become. People change, learn more about themselves and their partners, and kids are a powerful dynamic adding a lot of stress and needs. I don't think it's constructive to judge any divorce without having lived through that relationship first.
> Technically it would be a failed marriage. That doesn't mean the people involved are themselves 'failures'.
That's true but nobody was arguing that. The disagreement wasn't about whether they are failures (a description) but whether they failed (an action). I would say they definitely failed.
A better analogy might be "amputating a leg is a healthy end to gangrene". Better not to have gangrene in the first place, but if someone does, better to amputate the leg than die.
But you wouldn't say "amputating a leg is a healthy end to having legs" because for most leg havers, there are better outcomes.
In the same vein, I'd say "divorce is a healthy end to a bad marriage" but not "divorce is a healthy end to marriages in general".
The “bad” part seems like a strange distinction to need to make. Are people in good marriages getting divorced?
In other words, I think it’s reasonable to say that divorce is a healthy way to end a marriage, because if it ended in divorce, then by definition, at least one party thought it needed to, making it a bad marriage.
For middle class folks, marriage isn't much different than a typical employment contract with a large firm. Marriage usually revolves around house and assets, so your 200k down payment is the 100k sign on bonus for your spouse. Paying out mortgage is the stock vesting plan. Kids are additional stock grants for good performance. Divorce is selling shares.
I would say middle class folks will probably consider marriage to be more important. Like Viktor Frankl would say, the meaning of your life is either from your work, love or courage in difficulty for survival.
Most middle class folks I am sure don't fall in third bucket; and a lot of them are just doing 9-5 jobs, probably not doing something which can drive them like say most of the big entrepreneurs or researchers seem to be.
So that leaves love, which would become kind of very important to give their life a meaning. Marriage being a vow to have that love lasting throughout seems special. I am in late 20s, and even though I would want to do something great, the strive to find someone compatible with me seems to weigh on my mind more these days.
Those middle class folks are wasting their lives, then: just like an office job is an illusion of meaningful work, their marriage is an illusion of love.
I think anyone I know who considers marriage as “just a legal contract” isn’t saying that one should treat marriage as a contractual relationship like any other but rather that the ceremony itself is unimportant relative to the relationship as a whole. I think these are two very different things people may mean by the phrase and I feel like your comment suggests that one of those things is common while I would suggest that the other interpretation is more common.
If people thought of marriage as nothing but a legal contract, likely to be broken, and acted rationally then I expect they wouldn’t bother at all: the benefits aren’t particularly great while the risks are large.
I think we probably mostly agree with our own opinions but perhaps disagree on the opinions of others.
> I feel like your comment suggests that one of those things is common while I would suggest that the other interpretation is more common.
I read it as people taking that step in a relationship without much thought because that's what society has conditioned us to believe is normal and then divorcing like breaking-up.
> the benefits aren’t particularly great while the risks are large.
Marriage brings specific legal and financial benefits, depending on the country (married couples tax allowances, spousal rights to pensions and inheritance etc, spousal privilege in court, visa/residency rights, child custody rights).
As these benefits have reduced over a few decades, the number of marriages has gone down (at least in the West?). I don't think that's a coincidence.
You don't need a legal marriage to share a loving and fulfilling life together with a partner. But, if you do share a loving and fulfilling life together, marriage might benefit you for one or more of the above reasons.
Marriage and family as we know it is a relatively recent habit, only about few thousand years, even hundreds of years in many regions. It was justified and necessary to adapt in new environment like agricultural civilization, but it may be not advantageous in new current era of digital world.
This kind of thought is so far from my own. Marriage and family are the most important things in the vast majority of people's lives. Computers and Internet don't make them obsolete...
I would say the most sensible thing is simply the mutual declaration for the sake of administrivia, that until any of the members of a marriage say otherwise, we all are married. The only reason to even have the document is just for things like power of attorney. Who shall be considered a legal guardian responsible for a child, who is allowed to make decisions for another while they are incapacitated, etc. And the expiration date is "until further notice".
I don't think you have a right to call that sort of family sad or "tragic".
That's actually incredibly insulting, even abusive when it's embedded in policy that everyone has to live under.
Just imagine if I called your family sad and tragic. Even if I used hard unavoidable data to back up the judgement.
You don't think they have the right to have an opinion? How tolerant.
Everyone doesn't have to "live under" it, you don't have to get married.
I suspect having Mummy and Daddy being together "until further notice" would have disastrous impacts on children's sense of permanence and development.
That is defacto reality. If every kid at least knows a kid from a divorced family the damage to the sense of permanence of the family unit has already been done.
Not necessarily. I knew people from different families who were divorced, but rationalized that my parents were different and more committed, and so still just accepted it as an axiom that families stay together (except when they don’t).
While obviously not that consistent, as a kid I perfectly accepted that logic. If I try to place myself in that same mindset, I think I’d find the definition of “marriage is together until further notice” far more concerning than knowing some divorced parents.
I think it's important to make the distinction between religious and civil mariage.
Clearly civil mariage is just a contact, whose main purpose is the divorce (at least in my country - France - divorce is the main benefit of marriage). And as far as I know there is no commitment for it to last for life, but just until the end of the contract.
The benefit of being protected by the divorce. Divorce is here to protect the "weaker" (sorry probably not the right word) party.
For example if they have kids and one of the parent stops working to raise the kids, divorce will make sure that person is not left without anything.
There is another civil union (the PACS) and as far as I know the main (and maybe only) differences is that PACS do not get divorce (you can part much more quickly, each party just get their own stuff and that's it) and something related to ineritance taxes. So that's the main reasons why people marry I guess :)
To be fair, I'll add that it's also not legal to marry religiously if you are not married civilly, so some people probably get married civilly just to be able to marry religiously.
> For example if they have kids and one of the parent stops working to raise the kids, divorce will make sure that person is not left without anything.
It isn't the divorce which creates those rights, it is the marriage. The divorce rules only make it so that those rights are not abruptly suppressed after the dissolution of the marriage.
If you are married for some years in a state without common law marriage and then get divorced, you are probably due some of the house value, for example, even if it was in your husband's name. And one of the cars, and so on.
The same couple, not married, might have to sue to get one of the two cars and might not get any value from the house, even though they helped save for the down payment.
>That's like saying isn't death a healthy outcome for a cancer patient? ... But getting cancer in the first place is not "healthy", and so death caused by cancer is not "healthy".
What if your analogy is right and marriage is really not healthy in the first place? At least it cannot work for all people?
>If marriage is nothing more than a legal contract - which sadly for many people it is, then why even bother making vows such as "until death do us part"?
It could be a legal contract with such timing: “until death”
why not? Wasn’t it always has been like this by definition?
>All for show?
If contract is not taken seriously then any contract become ‘for show’
>Why not just put a time-clause for when the contract expires so that you can decide whether to sign a new one?
Because it would make it opposite to what it meant to represent? Anyway, why to bother if many people consider it
breakable at any moment already? Much more comfortable for those who do not intend to keep own promises.
>A highly utilitarian, and in my opinion, tragically sad view of marriage, but that is essentially what it has become for many people.
Has become? What if it always has been like this by design And many attempts to make it something else have failed?
I think this is only true if you modify the initial condition to be "...an irreparably terrible relationship". Without that, there is a third point which may be true:
- Fixing a marriage which is turning into a terrible relationship is a better outcome than divorce. In this way, divorce is a bad outcome, the same way as coming in second in Jeopardy and winning $2000 is a bad outcome compared to coming in first and winning (say) $10 000.
It seems weird to say "well you signed some papers, so it's extremely valuable that you're together for some legal purposes rather then happy".
The point of repairing a relationship is to remember that you once were happy and can be again by correcting behaviors and the like. But it seems bizarre to assume that's assured - it's even more bizarre to think it would be wrong to acknowledge that maybe you'd only wind up content but not happy, and so a separation is still preferable.
Or that actually you'd be happier alone then with someone else, but not exactly miserable if you were still with them etc.
> Divorce is only negative if we don't condition on the existence of a terrible relationship.
Not "only". A positive relationship that's ruined by outside factors/factions, for example, might end in divorce.
A relationship that benefits both people but has been mismanaged (ignorance, inexperience, etc.), might end in divorce.
Isn't the point of the OP in part that just by the biological accident of having female offspring one might become more likely to be divorced; that strongly implies that divorce isn't always down to inherent aspects of the relationship.
You are assuming what you are mean to prove, namely that life is inherently valuable, and that marriage is not inherently valuable. Someone who favours euthanasia could easily say that death is a positive resolution to disease.
To those who say life has inherent value, death is not positive, no matter the pain it may relieve. To those who say marriage has inherent value, divorce is not positive, no matter the pain it may relieve.
To turn your argument back on you:
Death as a reaction to health/life turning sour is a positive outcome, since we've conditioned on that development and it's now a sunk cost.
I happen to think that both life and marriage are inherently valuable and worth sacrificing for and holding on to, and for similar reasons.
Wouldn't a tumor removal be a better metaphor for an unhealthy marriage? There are so many worse outcomes than a divorce, there are no worse outcomes from cancer than death.
It's not a healthy outcome to marriage. You don't get married to be divorced later. The problem is that our society has out-advanced marriage but people still did not realize it (although marriage rate are trending lower).
Marriage made sense when the population was sparse, the parents needed workforce, and the woman needed protection. Most of that doesn't apply today. Marriage is mostly a "reliquat" from former society's traditions.
Sorry about your situation, but no. It's healthier than some of the worst outcomes but it's far from the top.
A marriage is an enterprise two people join in together, and then go through life doing the really important work of raising children and supporting each other.
Ideally this is accompanied by deep love and passion etc. Short of that, it's done with deep mutual commitment and appreciation of the other person and the work you're doing together.
Way shittier down the line are relationships plagued with resentment and mistrust, that in my experience have more to do with what the people bring into the relationship than their partner (basically: if both people are sane and enter thoughtfully into the marriage, you should not end up here.)
Once you're in that mode, where you don't have it together to work it out and grow together, sure divorce is happier than eternal rancor and abuse, but it's super-down the line.
I think this is important to understand because once you do, you're much more thoughtful about what you're getting into in the first place. I guess it's easier said for me because I married in my later 30s and had the life experience and introspection to know what I want and need and to appreciate my wife (who is different than me in ways that a less mature version of me might resent rather than appreciate)
> Once you're in that mode, where you don't have it together to work it out and grow together, sure divorce is happier than eternal rancor and abuse, but it's super-down the line.
This might be a bit of a trope, but it is at this exact moment that some couples have kids (like my parents did).
Having not been born yet, that was not very down the line from my point of view at all.
> Not to get too autobiographical here, but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage? So not 100% the most helpful thing to measure.
Do you have any evidence of this? As someone from a Muslim country, my family universally has stayed in bad marriages. My wife, an American, has a family rife with divorce. (Not just her parents, but the whole community. Many people don’t really realize this—among those with college degrees, almost 80% of marriages will last 20+ years. But among those with just a high school diploma, it’s just 40%. In lower middle class communities, kids with parents who are divorced are the norm.)
It’s not clear to me which one is better for the parents. But unhappy parents seems superior to divorced ones for the kids. The financial and structural disruption on kids from divorce is massive. It’s not just individual, it’s the whole community. In the lower middle class communities where my wife’s family is from, divorce is the norm. And I can see kids suffering from the disruption, and wanting stability, but having no role models and no guidance because most people around them are divorced.
This is obviously anecdotal. I’d be curious to see data—to my knowledge this hasn’t been studied rigorously. To me, the notion that “divorce is a fine outcome for marriage” is something that is counter intuitive enough to require some evidence.
Why was financial disruption worse than the emotional disruption of a bad marriage? I guess not having enough to eat is worse than an abusive marriage, but do people get into that much financial trouble from divorce usually? What about child support?
I find it hard to imagine a child growing up in a house with two parents who treat each other like shit is worse off than one with a single parent, but who knows?
> Why was financial disruption worse than the emotional disruption of a bad marriage? I guess not having enough to eat is worse than an abusive marriage
Look, I’m not talking about abusive marriages. For people without a college degree, 60% of marriages will end before the kids are independent and in their own two feet. Most of those don’t involve involve abuse.
> but do people get into that much financial trouble from divorce usually?
Yes. For the average middle class family, having to split into two households is incredibly financially disruptive. Most middle class couples aren’t in a position where one person can take over the housing payment alone. That means moving, potentially changing schools, etc. And there’s a ton of other shared expenses that each parent now has to pay separately.
> What about child support?
For a non-college educated man making the median $36,000 a year, child support here in Maryland works out to $567 per month. That doesn’t come close to offsetting the support of the other householder.
What happens with house payments in such cases? I suppose the house goes to the mother, but she can't pay mortgage alone and the father can't pay the mortgage plus rent plus child support plus everything else.
Mom sells the house and everyone moves. Even couples who are reasonably comfortable can’t afford to maintain an additional household to the one they have on the same income.
Median household income in my county is $80,000/year. That’s a bit under $5,300 month take home for a married couple. Which is fine—you can buy a 4BR house here in a good school district for $1,450 per month in mortgage. But no way the couple can afford to keep the house if they get divorced. Rent alone in a studio will be $750/month. (Like most normal places, it’s much more expensive to rent here than buy.) Even if the spouse moving out lives like a pauper that’s realistically a $1,500/month hole in the budget few families can cover. So Dad moves into a studio, mom and the kids move into a cheap 2BR, and you’re paying like $1,750 month for housing (total) because you’ve given up the cost advantages of home ownership. And say there is another $750 in new non-shared expenses. So that’s $1,000/month that’s no longer there that was going towards savings/college/enrichment activities, etc. They’ve traded a 4BR house in a nice suburb for two households that are struggling to get by and have no margin. If they’re lucky, the kids got to stay in the same school district, but they’ve probably been taken away from their neighborhood friends. This happened my step siblings in law recently. It’s extremely shitty.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other at an individual level, but the social and legal norms we create have aggregate effects, not just individual effects, and we should be able to talk about those as a distinct issue. From 1960 to 2010, in the US, the percentage of kids living apart from their fathers has tripled, and the percentage of kids living apart from their mothers has doubled.
My culture (and that of like 3/4 of the world’s population) says that’s a bad thing for kids and society as a whole. I used to think westerners were enlightened and had the right idea on allowing and encouraging individual freedom in this area, but now I think they’ve got it wrong. And it’s hard to really know without focusing on what’s been the aggregate effect.
Those statistics don't seem particularly meaningful. I know a lot of people with divorced parents who remarried/repartnered and the kids now have two sets of parents. They're... fine? Hell, as long as the parent-groups can get along, 4 parents sound better than 2...
But if they can't get along, I'm sure it's terrible. Just like if the parents stay together?
I created a new account in case this gets indexed somewhere. I am in my 30s and my own parents are still married, but they should have gotten divorced a long time ago. They never did, "because of the kids" and it pains me. They are fucking miserable. I have not seen them lovingly kiss each other in at least 3 decades (I only remember once when I was a toddler). They do not have intercourse of any kind, sleep in separate bedrooms, fight constantly, my dad has been having affairs (unsure if my mom knows about them, I doubt it would change anything if she did), all because they are too ashamed to get divorced, and at this point, they're too old to do it.
Of course looking in from the outside they seem like a happy couple - always went to social functions together, etc. But on the inside, definitely not. I always wonder once you take out the marriages that end in divorce, how many of the ones left are like my parents - happy on the outside, fucking miserable on the inside. In my own experience, the vast majority of friends' parents have been divorced, sometimes multiple times, and I already have friends my age who were married and divorced.
Needless to say, I am in no rush to get married, even in my 30s. I do have relationships when it's right, but I don't let society tell me if or when I should be getting married, if ever. It's way too big a risk to my personal happiness.
Unfortunately, my marriage resembles that of your parents. My only counterpoint to your belief that they would be happier if they divorced, is to suggest you may be minimizing they value they get from stability and certainty.
There’s value in knowing who’s going to care for you when you get cancer, even if there’s a lot of animosity now.
I agree, though context is important too. Getting separated at 80 would likely mean a severe drop in their quality of life, for the remainder of their days. Getting separated at 50 much less so, especially for the man (usually). At 40, the perceived value of that stability and certainty is probably not worth the unhappiness.
> isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?
It's a bit of a provocative way of saying things, but I am surprised at how conservative (in the social sense, not political) the other comments are, defending traditional family values and arguing that divorce is always a failure
Divorce can _absolutely_ be a healthy outcome to a marriage. If your marriage doesn't work after a time, the healthy option is to stop it. You can argue that you should try to "save your marriage"... but if neither you or your partner really wants to, why would you have this duty to try and salvage it rather than move on? At least if you don't have kids, as divorce tends to have bad impact on them apparently, although I think it's mostly because they're brought up in a society that teaches that divorce is failure and that a family is a mom and a dad.
Of course nobody is saying that divorce is "the most healthy" outcome, it's just "pretty healthy" in a whole range of situation, though not all. And there's divorce and divorce: sometimes it involves incredible drama, fighting and stress (not very healthy, although staying married probably would be worse in this case), and sometimes it's smooth, shake hands and go your own way.
Anecdotally: my parents divorced when I was ~15. It was smooth as far as I could see, although I imagine that unfun things happened that led to this. It made absolutely no difference to me, and I saw them bloom and be happier than I ever saw them: my father went from being a 9-5 robot to doing sports, be involved in local associations and take an unexpected interest in african art. My mom started doing photography and developped a passion for dance. I entirely credit their divorce for how much happier and interesting they got!
I haven't read anything about divorce always being a failure (or not yet).
If you get all your input from non-engineering journalists, comedians, talking heads, etc, you may never encounter any differing opinions; just as if 100 years ago you'd have believed divorce is always bad from those same people, and been surprised at what engineers said about how it can be occasionally a good thing.
>but isn't divorce a pretty healthy outcome to a marriage?
Could be and then it would mean marriage is not ‘healthy’ in the first place? Which could be by the way.
What if it’s so by design? I mean it’s very difficult to come up with one design that works for ‘all’. Not a trivial task I would say and isn’t it destine for failure?
The intended comparison is presumably not be to all marriages, but to marriages which are strained enough for divorce to become a question. I don’t know what good data on that would look like.
Perhaps ‘Outcomes for children of parents who went to marriage counselling’
Even then, couples that get counselling are probably a healthier subset of all marriages than would make for an ideal reference.
“Daughters provoke parental strife” implies causality not present in TFA.
Also, as a survival of an abusive home, “daughters provoke...” sounds like blaming children for their parents dysfunction. Maybe that wasn’t the intent of the OP. However kids blaming themselves for their parents problems is a pathology many kids that went through these situations have to work to overcome. Any culpability belongs to the grown ups who couldn’t resolve their issues and put the kids first.
This seems to me like a rare "natural experiment" where correlation implies causality. Because whether a child is a son or daughter is essentially random, it's hard to imagine a confounding factor causing both daughters and divorce.
I think that the remaining factors will be the "difficulty" of parenting the behaviour of sons vs daughters in contrast to the difficulty a daughter or son experiences being parented. That is while you can use the sex of the child as an independent variable, you still need to explain why it has this effect.
> In the Netherlands, by the time their first-born is 18, 20.12% of couples will have divorced if that child is a son, compared with 20.48% if she is a daughter
Ok, so 0.36% of couples divorce over having a girl, and it only happens when the girl reaches puberty. This could just be the cases where the dad sexually assaults the girl and the mom finds out and divorces him, the numbers are small enough for me to believe that is possible at least.
I'm not sure why you react so strongly, do you have any reason at all?
A couple of percent of girls gets sexually harassed by their biological dads, that is more than enough to believably explain the discrepancy in divorce. The fact that it only happens when the girls reaches puberty reinforces my interpretation. The researchers in this study didn't research why the difference exists, so my interpretation is as good as theirs.
> I'm not sure why you react so strongly, do you have any reason at all?
Because your comment and others are grasping at demonizing one thing in a fairly sexually prejudiced ways, prejudiced because the assumptions don't factor in any counterbalancing force, such as boys being sexually harassed by either parent or outside the family unit. Or creating a laser focus so quickly to there being a perpetrator and victim of sex assault at all!
Plenty of other strife, such as with the boys, is also more than enough to counteract the discrepancy in divorce here.
The reaction is about how this topic reflects a lot more about you, and the additional negative affects on society that are centered around pre-judicial judgement on males, and a society that ignores where males are victims.
In this thread, and this current point in time, I completely understand how this might seem like a completely left field reaction to you and many people. But it shouldn't be and I can do my part by pointing that out.
Regardless, it is shocking to me that people would gravitate toward "aha this must be what happened" out of the universe of possibilities in what could just as easily be a rounding error.
I can simultaneously acknowledge that maybe during the time of this study, that population did do exactly what you imagine. Its just has to factor in so much more for that to even be the first thing one thinks about.
If it was just dads refusing to understand girls etc you'd see at least some difference before then.
And since the reported incidence of sexual abuse by biological dads is larger than the total increase in divorces over the entire period I'd argue that is likely the main culprit, and that daughters aren't really a problem with non abusive dads.
No really, no. Note that the text says "first born", not "only child". That 0.36 percentage point difference is covering so many combinations it's effectively meaningless, and any opining about the "why" of what is essentially an error value is not just equally meaningless, but actively damaging, because it convinces you that there is something that needs explaining and can be taught to others, lending credence and validity to an incredible, invalid line of reasoning.
A couple of percent of girls gets sexually harassed by their biological dads, that is more than enough to believably explain the discrepancy in divorce. The fact that it only happens when the girls reaches puberty reinforces my interpretation. The researchers in this study didn't research why the difference exists, so my interpretation is as good as theirs.
No, it isn't, and now you're wilfully ignoring the paper's findings to put forth your own unsubstantiated claim pretending it is just as valid as statistically backed research. It's just something you told yourself and now you're pretending your own conviction deserves equal standing. Which it does not.
This hypothesis ignores the fact that "when the girl reaches puberty", the excess divorce rate (which looks to just be "% of couples divorced if child is daughter - % of couples divorced if child is son") is a lot higher:
> [I]n the five years when the first-born is between the ages of 13 and 18, that increase goes up to 5%. And it peaks, at 9%, when the child is 15. In America, for which the data the researchers collected were sparser than those in the Netherlands, the numbers are roughly double this.
A gap of 5-15% of all couples is I hope way too much to be explained by fathers who abuse their daughters.
You misinterpreted the data, that is 5% more divorces during those years, not that 5% of couples got divorced over it. The total increase in divorces over the entire childhood is 0.36% of all couples.
You're right, I misunderstood the statistic. It's saying that the fraction of couples with a first-born daughter who have divorced when she's 15 is 9% higher than the fraction of couples with a first-born son who have divorced when he's 15. Bleh, comparing rates is unpleasant business.
> Earlier research has also shown that one of the most common things parents fight over is how much they should control their teenagers’ personal choices, such as how they dress, whom they date and where they work.
Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter. One effective way to reduce bigotry is through compassionate exposure: knowing, and sympathizing with a member of a population different from yourself.
> In light of all this, it is intriguing to note that Dr Kabatek and Dr Ribar found one type of couple who seem immune to the daughter effect: those in which the father grew up with a sister.
I have friction with my stepchild. He doesn't want me to be a part of his life. Sometimes, I wish that he was older and we could try MDMA therapy to build a compassionate bond... he's not even in elementary school yet; that's a great way to get your child taken away. But I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...
> Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter.
That's a bit of a stretch. N of 1 but I (male) can easily see myself being more open about my daughters' personal choices than my wife. (Yes I read the article and saw the point about strife between fathers and daughters. If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe. Whether that's an effective approach is another question.)
> If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe.
It can be both. Infantilizing, being overprotective, on the basis of gender is an expression of sexism. I'm sure that it's well intentioned, but if one only examines their intentions and not impact, then they're not actually reducing harm
The world is more dangerous in many ways for women. Is a father seeking to therefore protect a daughter differently than a son sexist? There are certainly things that a father would do only with a son for the same reasons.
“It can be” is not the same as “it always is”. Devil is in the details. Infantilising someone or putting someone on a pedestal, rather than communicating and understanding their lived experiences, is how I currently distinguish sexism from usefully accounting for real differences.
(I can’t judge my own success in this regard, but it’s where I’m at right now).
The girl will perceive it as unfair and will react accordingly.
Also, father needs to make sure he is protecting her from actual danger rather then imaginary. For example, if you are controlling your daughter "for her own good" against imaginary dangers and teaching her to accept control like that, you are priming her for controlling abusive relationship.
And the actual danger to her is exactly that - a guy who is controlling and later abusive. If she interprets early warning red flags as "caring" or "protection", she will get exactly that.
The world is more dangerous in many ways for women.
Women have something of a tendency to live longer than men. Men are more likely to take dangerous jobs, like fire fighter or infantry member. Men are more likely to go to jail. Women are more likely to attempt suicide and survive it. Men are more likely to succeed at killing themselves when they attempt suicide.
There are lots of shitty things that go on in the world and the world likes to sexually harass women, sexually assault women, treat them like whores who were "asking for it" when they end up raped, pregnant out of wedlock, etc. etc. But it's questionable logic to claim that the world is more dangerous for women.
Pretty sure a cornerstone of gender studies is the idea that patriarchy is self-perpetuating - that is women learn and suffer from norms which they then push on other women. Is it not just as likely a wife was taught "the way women should dress and act to be "happy"" and tries to force it on her daughter despite opposition from the father?
If he’s a four-year old or younger, I’d just give it time. Trying to do anything even minutely like MDMA therapy would be massive overkill. Four-year-olds are narcissists just getting used to cooperative play with other kids.
Show that you take your responsibility as a step parent as a duty, even if he says he hates you (the best reaction to that is to unemotionally and calmly make it clear your parental role is unconditional, e.g. ‘ok, but i’m still your stepdad and i love you.’) Or: ‘ok, you feel how you feel but it’s still my job to help you brush your teeth.’
Give him low pressure opportunities to do things with you, don’t force anything that isn’t necessary.
Don’t expect too much right now, you are likely connected to some trauma in his life, and no four year old likes to be forced to do anything.
Stepmom, actually. Just because I contemplate a thing doesn't mean I'm seriously interested in attempting it. I'm a problem solver, and out-of-the-box thinking requires contemplation of bad ideas. And yeah, your advice is in line with my actual approach to the situation. But sometimes I worry that I don't have enough compassion for him, which planted the seed of me needing the MDMA treatment. Sometimes bad ideas just need some rework to get a genuine out-of-the-box solution.
In reality daughters are getting all these ideas about how to behave from their friends and from contemporary popular culture.
So actually what is happening is a struggle between parental advice, and outsider influence.
Now I find it interesting how you immediately make the jump and accuse the father (and it's also interesting that you single out the father) to be the bad guy.
Dare I say outsiders don't give a shit about the daughter and their influence over her is very likely much more negative?
It isn't a jump. It's a deduction made from the second paragraph: dads primed to empathize with their daughters seem to be immune to this. I'd conjecture that dads without sisters, who had close (non-romantic) friendships with girls in their teens, are also less inclined to this friction.
He currently doesn't want (you) to be a part of his life
Considering he's not even in elementary school yet, I wouldn't worry too much about it right now. I'm not a parent, but it seems to me like 4-5 year olds or younger aren't the most rational or emotionally-developed people.
Just be a good person/parent and I imagine he'll warm up to you as he gets older.
> I have friction with my stepchild. He doesn't want me to be a part of his life. [...] he's not even in elementary school yet
Just be an adult, keep working at the relationship. Spend time being there, available for the play that children enjoy. Be open, let the child lead the stories and tell you things. If there is a preschool, visit and volunteer. It can be easier if the other parent is not there while you play.
> I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...
Had to laugh at this, you know what you are doing, it will work out.
> Sometimes, I wish that he was older and we could try MDMA therapy to build a compassionate bond... he's not even in elementary school yet; that's a great way to get your child taken away. But I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...
And which side do you think those one-sided interpersonal problems are on?
FWIW if you were my step parent and you seriously considered this to be a potential solution I wouldn't want you to be part of my life either. Maybe approach this from the other viewpoint: your stepchild does not want you in their life because they want someone else in their life instead. It never was about you in the first place.
> And which side do you think those one-sided interpersonal problems are on?
Mine! Did you even read what I said? Y'all having trouble with that "generous interpretation" here.
> It never was about you in the first place.
No, it's about his wellbeing. He would be happier if he was happy to have me around. He'd be better off not spiting himself simply for the purpose of defiance.
You are entirely missing my point: he would likely be happy if you weren't around.
You say the problem is yours but then you right away foist it back on your step-child because he is the one that would be happier 'if he was happy to have you around'. But that is the root of the problem. Adults will be adults I guess. Best of luck there.
> You are entirely missing my point: he would likely be happy if you weren't around.
It kinda sounds like you're projecting your baggage on my situation, which you know nothing about. Before I arrived on the scene, my partner was at wits end, and didn't have the energy to be a good parent and also maintain a professional career. With me here, we can share parental and other household duties, pool financial resources, etc. The child has needs, but so do parents.
As for what makes young kids happy: it's nearly the opposite of what they actually need. He hates bedtime, he hates bathtime, he doesn't want to brush his teeth, he'd rather have dessert than vegetables, he'd rather watch TV than go to kindergarten, and it goes on and on. And that's about what he gets at the other household -- any rule is negotiable, and a tantrum always wins, because that parent is overworked and exhausted all the time. So naturally, he hates our household. Would he be happier if my partner was similarly exhausted? Maybe in the moment, but not in the long term.
He blames me for his parents' divorce, which happened over a year before I came around (but of course he can't remember that far back). And you know what? I was open to bailing on the scene, for his good, for the first year that I was around -- but the other parent isn't remotely interested in reconciliation. He thinks he'd be happy if I was gone and his bio-parents remarried, but he has trouble thinking 5 minutes in the future, let alone 15 years. If they were still together, he'd be stuck in the middle of their toxic relationship -- his life would be awful.
> He thinks he'd be happy if I was gone and his bio-parents remarried
That is the key. And until he is able to realize that it isn't necessarily true this situation will persist. Keep in mind that his parents may have had a toxic relationship but that he doesn't really see it that way: to him this was the time when his parents were together and he could see both of them, to him you are an obstacle on the way to achieving a re-run of that situation. Little kids are pretty good at knowing what they want, extremely good at being angry at anything and everything and not so good at realizing any of this so you have your work cut out for you.
You've described this as a one sided issue, which makes it sound like you see your worldview as correct and are seeking a way to get the child to adjust his viewpoint.
Some empathy, rather than drugging the child, might help. Try and understand where he is coming from and be honest with yourself about whether there are things that you are doing that could be contributing to a rift.
If you read carefully, you might notice that I'm suggesting that the parent is the one who needs more empathy; that the parent is the one who I'm willing to entertain the thought of "drugging".
Anecdotal, but I have three sons and four daughters. In my experience boys are harder when they are younger (wild, causing mayhem and physical destruction in their wake, solving problems using fighting, etc.) but in their teenage years prefer to hang out quietly in their rooms. Girls on the other hand tend to be calmer in their younger years, but then in their teenage years become argumentative, moody, causing lots of emotional and psychological strife. It takes until they are in their early 20s for things to calm down. Though by then the damage has already been done. In an ideal world I'd like to raise girls when they are young and boys when they are older.
I have one son and one daughter. This has been my experience as well. Both of them are teenagers now. Dealing with my son is a lot easier now compared to my daughter. Just a few years ago, it was the opposite.
Joking aside, I’m the youngest in a family of 3 boys and 4 girls and your comment lines up with my upbringing. Being the youngest I got to see the teenager year insanity of my sisters all unfold. Another anecdote is that when one of my brothers did get in trouble it was always something significantly worse than my sisters.
Not to be snide, but was wondering if the number of bathrooms available in a family might matter. Growing up with sisters, that was a frequent source of tension.
My youngest sister got married young and against the advice of everyone that loved her, more because the groom was a scumbag than the haste of the decision. Well she went full revenge mode and had to be totally cut off from the family once she and her husband started suing my parents. It really put my act of rebellion many years prior, joining the Marines, into perspective for my mother - who had until that point still carried hard feelings. The stereotype about women being irrationally vindictive doesn't come out of nowhere.
Eh, my mother's conduct wasn't totally insane - I'd be a little displeased if my son not only selected a branch that prided itself on combat exposure (right as bombs started falling on Baghdad), but he also intentionally chose the one component of the Corps that guaranteed he'd be getting shot at for months on end. I wouldn't have taken it so personally, but I'd still be pretty irritated.
Most boys learn to mask their emotional state once the teenage years roll around owing to various vectors of messaging. I fear too many people are relieved by the ease of interface this brings about, but it can and usually is very deceptive. The consequent lack of communication just makes a void that gets filled with all sorts of terrible information about being "CHAD OR NOT" amongst other garbage that has to be unlearned.
Basically, across most developed countries, women attempt to commit suicide 3x more than men, but men complete suicide 3x more than women. So men are approximately 10x as likely to succeed when they do try.
This is a combination of male suicide attempts being underreported and gendered differences in suicide as a cry for help vs a desire to end it all. There's also a minor statistical effect where a single suicidal women will attempt suicide multiple times vs a single suicidal male attempting it once (so you get different numbers comparing suicide attempts by gender vs people who have attempted suicide by gender).
I see this claim a lot whenever suicide gender imbalance comes up. I think it's really an political idea trying to compensate for the idea that girls who attempt suicide are doing it to seek attention rather than to actually die. Some things to consider:
People who attempt suicide to seek attention are still suffering serious problems and it's not something to judge as "not a real problem".
Men and boys engage in risky activities which aren't classified as suicide attempts but may be exacerbated by wanting to die, such as violence, drug abuse, dangerous driving, even extreme sports.
Men sometimes commit suicide in very deliberate and carefully planned ways that ensure success. That's bound to be more successful than spontaneously running into the bathroom and swallowing every tablet in the medicine cupboard. Sometimes this is because they believe they've failed their social obligations and will never be respected. Eg. cheating on their wife, beating their wife, being unemployed, etc.
Yep, it starts really early in grade school with the relentless teasing boys receive for crying. You learn to bottle that shit up by 4th grade to make it as a “big kid”.
Our culture doesn't have a lot of coming of age rituals or expectations. Lack of purpose and responsibility does not do good things to people or societies. Ambiguity in self identity can lead to emotional and psychological isolation, and things like loneliness epidemics. I totally agree with the need for communication, expectations/helping set goals, and love is spelled T.I.M.E.
Another example I'll add to my collection of liberal misgivings.
Liberal democracy and the liberal social and economic orders have done so much good for western societies, but this is another great example of how something they have displaced -- coming of age rituals and expectations -- has really had a negative impact on the people living in them.
Yes. Unfortunately the society as a whole still dont recognise it as a problem. I am generally MUCH more worried about my boys in the modern world than my girls.
"leaving boys behind" is a big problem in current times, and still noone does anything about it. This is especially seen in education, where girls/women outnumber boys/men in higher education by huge margins (university of ljubljana here is 60:40 women, so 50% more women enrolled).
Do you think if this a difference between the nature of genders or a difference emerging due to how parents and/or society treats boys and girls differently?
of course. but even if you fix environment, girls will usually interact and experience the world different than boys which obviously will cause their brains to form differently. even though environment is same.
lots of studies about that. especially twin studies with m/f twins.
> lots of studies about that. especially twin studies with m/f twins.
Twin studies with m/f twins outside of an environment shaped by external imposition of traditional (or otherwise differentiated) gender roles and gender-based expectations and treatments?
If so, how was that acheived?
If not, you haven't supported the conclusion of differences even if you fix environmental differences.
Right. I can't imagine what "fixed environment" could even possibly be construed to mean. The conscious pressures are unavoidably pervasive, let alone the unconscious ones. Doesn't much matter how the parents parent. Try counting how many times in fictional media women are written to respond to every conflict by collapsing in a puddle of tears, vs men.
One thing you can do is look at people of the same sex but with different levels of testosterone. That would effectively control for environment, unless you think that higher testosterone has subtly visible effects that cause others to (unconsciously?) treat them differently—which actually seems likely, if e.g. a high-T girl would tend to do more "rough" activities and consequently wear "tough", non-delicate clothing—but that in itself would be a useful takeaway.
Another thing you can do is compare countries, or families, or perhaps schools, that are "more gender-role-restrictive" or "less gender-role-restrictive". Surely if the environment has an impact, then varying the strength of that environment would vary the impact. (Obviously there would be other variables to control for.)
Well those behaviours haven't changed for hundreds of years. Grand and Great Grand parents share many of the same stories. Surely their environment are much different to what we have now.
The genders clearly are quite different (on average with large individual variations). It also must matter a lot how society is structured to handle the young maturing. I don't think 2021 America is particularly good at this.
A single data set for a single family which may not generalize.
I have two sons. One was a handful when he hit puberty and one was not. I sat both of them and a friend of theirs down one day to talk to the one who was a handful and talked to him about the impact of hormones on his mood. The punchline for that conversation was "Your problem is called testosterone, not My Bitch Mother."
All three boys laughed and all three boys were easier to cope with afterwards.
I wonder if you missed the joke in this one and took it literally? I don’t think he was intending to suggest it was literally actually scientifically rigorous evidence.
I have something of a tendency to take things literally online, but, also, it's becoming clear to me here lately that I sometimes miss friendly banter on HN because no one ever talks to me that way. If a guy here is being "friendly," you can pretty much bet dollars to donuts that he is really wanting to know if I will sleep with him, which makes it enormously difficult to figure out how to interact here "normally" and I sometimes don't know why in the hell I bother because it seems like a lose-lose scenario for me and maybe this entire thing is a giant waste of my time and will never be anything else.
What I said was I fail to correctly interpret friendly banter that occurs between other people here because it isn't something I first-hand experience.
Being ugly to me and people downvoting me and all this crap for stating that doesn't change it. It's just more evidence that people are all too often not friendly to me as an individual, so I stand by all of my above observations.
1. People here are not actually friendly to me. They are sometimes faux friendly while treating me like nothing but a piece of ass, which I deem to be predatory behavior, the opposite of friendly.
2. That fact makes it hard for me to correctly interpret friendly banter between other people when it does occur.
3. I continue to wonder if posting here is a giant waste of my time given the amount of ridiculous crap I get for no real reason other than posting as openly female.
I misunderstood that you were were talking about interactions here. You could probably tell that based on my response. I'm not 'being ugly to you' - and I know you might not be referring specifically to me. But misunderstandings like this happens, and it's nothing personal and you also shouldn't stress that much over.
Seeing how (to me) you overreacted to both my and '
zadokshi' comment with a long reply about your stress and how much you suffer from these interactions, I guess I would suggest you either stop posting here - at least for a while - to relax, or create a username that doesn't indicate your gender or real identity in any way.
In a side note, if I was on this level of stress and disappointment (sorry, english as second language and the best word here escaped my mind) in other people and and interaction with them, I would try to see someone to talk too.
Edit: BTW, you literally said 'if a guy here is being friendly...'
Edit: BTW, you literally said 'if a guy here is being friendly...'
Yes, I did and the very next set of words is the following qualifier:
you can pretty much bet dollars to donuts
It's not some kind of "all men" statement, but that's likely how a lot of people are interpreting it. It's a "I have to invest so much ridiculous energy in trying to not accidentally signal that I'm here hoping some random internet stranger will pick me up that it makes it hard as all hell to try to behave normally and talk normally and interpret things normally."
Anyway, I said I was leaving. This is my last clarification. All other "Wow, I can't believe people are so wildly misinterpreting my words" reactions will be kept to myself.
Have a nice Saturday. (Or whatever day of the week it is where you live.)
You said something people disagree with (and mostly being guys here) that proves the point.
Then you accuse friendly people of not being friendly and treating you like apiece of ass, admit you cannot recognize friendly banter, and accuse people of sexism.
If someone here is unfriendly to others, it's you.
But that's not workable for a long list of reasons that I'm both tired of trying to explain and tired of being told are not legitimate concerns or whatever. It boils down to this: men are not expected to hide their gender to participate online. Telling a woman to hide hers as a "solution" is dismissing her very real problems and compounding them.
It shouldn't be an offense worthy of being downvoted to hell to say "Yeah, I missed the joke for the following two reasons, one of which is no joking around allowed when talking to Doreen! Can't have that!
It's exhausting to have to err on the side of being excessively serious every minute I'm here because if I make the mistake of being my normal, friendly self, everyone wants my phone number so to speak.
Making that observation isn't me being a bitch, but getting downvoted to hell for it sure makes me sympathetic to the hords of women who openly hate on men and blame the conspiracy theory of The Patriarchy for all their ills.
Anyway, I need to go do other things. This is not a conversation I really want to have. At all.
Edited: Because auto-corrupt is the bane of my existence.
The main problem is that HN has no messaging feature, so people are probably skeptical of the claim that > 0 men are trying to hook up with you (or anyone else) on HN.
Pointing out a comment where this has happened would go a long way to bolster the claim.
> If a guy here is being "friendly," you can pretty much bet dollars to donuts that he is really wanting to know if I will sleep with him
I understand what you're saying here, and I also understand that it can be very frustrating to have to be "on guard" all the time because there are bad actors out there. However, I think generalizing that all men that are friendly are after sex is insulting. There are plenty of men that don't pay any attention to what sex the people they interact with online are, and plenty more that just aren't looking for that type of thing during those interactions. I expect it's probably most of them, with the caveats that 1) I have no basis to back up that guess, and 2) the bad actors certainly stand out a lot more, so likely weigh the "feel" of how many bad actors there are to one side.
Given the UI of Hacker News shows the username only in a tiny grey font that very few people read, has no profile pictures or DM functionality, I seriously doubt that most people being friendly here are trying to get into your pants. This isn't Twitter. Generally, I have no idea of the gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation of the people I interact with here unless it's explicitly mentioned in the comment to make a point.
It's always strange to see this kind of thing said. It's uniquely western that this behaviour would be tolerated.
In my neck of the woods, such disrespect would result in a hiding, such that by the time a child is 3 they know not to disrespect their parents... at least not to the extent of verbal insults like that.
What would anyone other than Ted Cruz allow someone else to disrespect their spouse like that?
My son never called me a bitch and the only time in 22 years of marriage their father ever did was to say "Honey, I think you are pregnant. You are being such a bitch." and because he never, ever spoke to me that way, I didn't say one word in reply. I just went and got a pregnancy test (like that same day or within a day or two) and, lo and behold, I was in fact pregnant.
I'm the one in the family with a potty mouth who swears like a sailor. It was funny to them and they all three laughed in part because that line was colorfully descriptive of his cranky, blamey behavior, not because anyone in the family ever spoke to me that way.
Ah HN. Where else can I read about someone abusing an infant with nostalgia, while also suggesting that it’s a failing of western culture to not beat ones children.
Here's my take on it... A younger non-parent me understands the western take on "not beating your children" very well. But the current parent me can also see why parents sometimes would beat their kids.(not that it is right.). Honestly, negative feedback/reinforcement is also needed to discipline(and I agree physical assault is the wrong way to do it.). The point I'm trying to make here is the stance against hitting your children stems from a "ideal well-adjusted parent" (not different from the "rational actor" in economics). And Yes, I'm contrasting the "ideal vs the actual". For context: I grew up in India in the 80-90s in a rural area. Personally, in my parenting I'm starting to use the "sama-dhana-beda-dhanda" ordering to some extent and customization for family settings of course.
I was hit as a kid. I have no distinct memory of being hit really, but I have distinct memories of being scared of it if I misbehaved and parents getting angry.
As a parent now, I see two reasons a parent might hit their kid, and neither is acceptable to me.
(A) you lose your temper because the child misbehaves. This isn’t acceptable because you’re reacting emotionally. The outcome could be extreme, either mentally or physically.
(B) you don’t lose your temper and make a reasoned decision to hit the child. This is even worse because you’ve justified hurting a child, to yourself.
Its not news that how a child is raised will impact their outlook on life. I wasn’t hit a lot, and I’m generally able to not make a physical reaction (such as hitting) when I am upset with my son.
I’ve seen first hand that others who had more violence in their childhood (eg hit with a wire coat hanger by a parent) will themselves be much more likely to react with physical violence if they get upset.
It's worth noting, there is a pretty big difference between something like a simple spanking and being beaten with a wire clothes hanger. There's a trend to treat the two extremes both as "beating your child" and something a parent should be locked up for doing. I'm not a fan of that grouping.
There are times when a parent needs to do something that will make it very clear that the child's behavior is completely inappropriate. Things for which, if they do not teach the child this, it will cause problems later. For some people, that act may be a spanking or similar. For others, it might be making the child eat soap.
Personally, I'm a bellower. I almost never raise my voice. But when I do, I am heard... period; everyone in the house stops in their tracks to find out what has pushed me over the edge. I don't like yelling, but if my child is doing something that could cause them physical injury (or similar) and I cannot seem to get them to stop by telling them to... I raise my voice, a lot.
Where I grew up, corporal punishment was the norm. If I misbehaved at home, I'd have to fetch "the whopper" which was a thick leather dog collar.
If I misbehaved at school, I'd get a caning (bamboo) or hiding (short length of hose pipe).
I was never abused. Boundaries were always known, and the punishment for crossing them also known. If you got in trouble.
I mean... you do something cheeky, and the punishment is a bit of pain for 10 seconds. That was always much much better than being told how badly you'd disappointed your parents or teacher.
I'd take a hiding over a telling off any day.
FYI, my partner was also beaten as a child, but she'd vehemently against corporal punishment now. Our children are being raised without the cane.
On the other hand, that is a strength in that it's an excellent control for family environment, parents' socioeconomic status and educational attainment, neighborhood quality, etc.
I have two boys age 8 and 11. It’s nontrivial keeping a boy alive between the ages of 3 and about 6. We’ve been in the ER so many times for stitches and other care that I asked if they had a rewards system or like a punch card for a free visit.
Well, no one’s perfect. I’d rather take a risk and get a little hurt than be totally safe all the time.
The last time I was in the ER was due to falling off a skateboard and needing stitches in my chin. I was trying to learn to skate, at 45. My son got me a skateboard for Father’s Day. I always wished I’d learned to skate as a kid.
Pry 50% of my ER calls are due to bike wrecks. My wife always says the day I buy a motorcycle is the day she buys a black dress and veil :D
Mine are currently the opposite. My daughter (10) has been a handful pretty much since she turned three. Love her to pieces, but nothing about raising her is easy. My son (8) is super relaxed, laid back, compliant. He gets into fights with his sister, but she is the one who picks the fights. She's also much larger than he is, which does not help.
Your description of boys sounds like my 6 year old daughter. Except she's also emotional, moody, and can go from 0 to 60 in half a second. Can't wait till the teenage years, I'm sure that'll be a blast. Luckily our twin 3 year olds (boy/girl) are much easier so far.
I've overheard parents talk about how easy daughters are. Always made me laugh a little.
"‘Uproar’ offers a distressing but effective solution to the sexual problems that arise between fathers and teen-age daughters in certain households. Often they can only live in the same house together if they are angry at each other, and the slamming doors emphasize for each of them the fact that they have separate bedrooms."
This is disgusting and a terrible state for the status quo to be in. I much prefer an overbearing patriarchal normal over this cancerous middle ground.
I guess, when I read the article I was reminded of this 'Game' from Eric Berne's book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49176.Games_People_Play). Could be a reason why (more divorce) if this tension / game was to highlight problems in the relationship.
This field is generally poorly replicated. I have a very low prior that all this "it's just sex" stuff is true. It seems like the sort of provocative explanation that is typical of pop psych. More catchy than true.
Probably more harmful than useful in dealing with what is ultimately the realization that free agents have different objectives and that immature agents are poor determiners of their ultimate objectives.
The other findings are telling:
Fathers who had sisters growing up, were less likely to face divorce. Families with immigrant background were more likely to face divorce.
What does it tell you? That it's actually the fathers causing strife because they do not treat their daughters correctly? Or that fathers who understand their daughters behavior are not as negatively emotionally affected by it?
It could also be that fathers who had no sisters were more emotionally attached to their daughters, whereas fathers who grew up with sisters has less emotional attachment to their daughters and consequently were less affected by their horrible teenage years.
This just seems all sorts of misguided. To the point where it’s blaming the daughters for parents divorce. Anyways, I tried to read the article and got hit with a paywall, so I can’t go much deeper than the headline.
The title here on HN isn't right. There's no indication that daughters provoke this in the title or article itself, only that having daughters does, which is not the same. The actual cause is barely touched.
My anecdotal experience as a father of 3 daughters: my relationship definitely got worse and I believe the root cause is the diminished empathy from my wife, on the other hand my sister got 2 boys and our relationship became incredibly close, she became more empathetic to me and my father!
For instance the movies they like to watch, also they are annoyed with the mess of my working table, full with arduinos, eletrônics, computers - the same with my guitars or even the kind of art and decoration I appreciate. Before my daughters, the situation was more simetrical between me and my wife - now I feel more isolated, without my own space at home, furthermore without partner to Discuss books or watch tv shows, my wife is more and more focused in the girls world - during our 10 year dating, we were close friends with lot in common, I would never have predicted this change.
I think I understand, if I may phrase it like this: your life before had a balance between masculine and feminine and now you feel that it is skewing heavily toward feminine.
i find it odd how article doesn't discuss at all possibility of sexual abuse (or suspicion) of teenage daughter by father as reason for elevated risk during puberty suddenly disappearing when daughter moves out around age 20
> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons
From my own experience. When my daughter hit 12 it was a fucking nightmare. The hormones hit girls hard and they can become incredibly difficult. That said, now she’s 13 things are much easier and look to be getting easier by the week. Although my wife and I both have to be very understanding and on the same team to deal with difficult behaviour — we have a lot of strategy meetings.
Lacking empathy, and wanting independence without responsibility are part of being a teenager. But 12-year old girls can sometimes be super charged griefers.
On the flip side, teenagers are actually awesome to hang out with and total joys full of creativity and fun — if you work through the refusal to clean their room, general lack of hygiene and the drama.
Well, if it helps, different kids are different, and hit their hard times at various ages. (As a one time camp counselor, I've seen all kinds of easy and problem kids of all different ages!)
> if you work through the refusal to clean their room
Well, is it their room or not? If it’s their room, viz. their inviolable space, what basis[1] do you have to enforce your standards on others’ spaces? Unless it’s an actual hygiene/H&S/hoarding situation, or part of the de-jure shared living space (like a Jack+Jill bathroom) then a messy room isn’t a real problem, and raising a fuss about it is only going to create conflict.
[1]: “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument: your kids have no choice w.r.t. where they live.
EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)
The role of a parent is to help children grow into healthy functioning adults. Avoiding unnecessary conflict is something we should all strive for, avoiding all conflict is tantamount to simply not parenting.
Frankly this entire argument feels like an intentional twisting of the common expression "their room."
I took it to mean their bedroom specifically, assuming they have a bedroom to themselves.
I’m fine with having family “team cleans”: it’s a positive shared experience, and I can’t protest instilling discipline for tidiness either - I just draw the line at “tidy your room” as overstepping a crucial boundary that arbitrarily encroaches on our autonomy.
By analogy, it’s like if my parents forced me to use a particular desktop wallpaper image on my computer, or restricting what I wore on weekends without a better reasoned argument than “because I said so”.
> I just draw the line at “tidy your room” as overstepping a crucial boundary that arbitrarily encroaches on our autonomy.
Teenagers don't have full autonomy, that's why they aren't adults. Parents exist to set boundaries and expectations for teenager's future adulthood (or more specifically their viewpoint on what a normal adult is).
Many teenagers enter adulthood and realize their parent's expectations weren't who they wish to be. But generally their parent's version is a good enough starting point to discover who they wish to become as an adult.
If new adults decide they want to live in a mess, at that time they can choose to do so because they hopefully understand the social, functional, and health consequences of that choice. An understanding a teenager may lack.
It's also about providing them with the necessary skills so that they actually do have a choice. If a kid never learns to tidy up, wash dishes, sort their laundry etc. then when they move out of home they may not know how to take care of themselves.
If they have the skills and just choose to be a slob, that's on them. But many young adults seem genuinely lost.
It's a stupid comparison, because keeping your stuff organized is an important life skill while choice of desktop wallpaper is irrelevant.
Well, I guess if your desktop wallpaper was porn or nazi paraphernalia your parents would be totally right to teach you that it should be something else.
Frankly your posts read like someone who doesn't understand that as an adult, it's your responsibility to have more wisdom and experience than your kids, and to help them benefit from it.
as an adult, it's your responsibility to have more wisdom and experience than your kids, and to help them benefit from it.
This is true, but it's also your responsibility to help them gain wisdom and experience. Making decisions for them may leverage your wisdom and experience wonderfully, but sometimes it's important to let them make mistakes and learn from them.
Sure. I am saying "the what", you are suggesting a "how." Hopefully the parent's wisdom and experience enables them to select the right approach for the circumstance.
Using the "clean your room" example though, that's more of a skill and habit because it's not the kind of thing that's gonna feel like "a mistake to learn from" - perhaps until much much later. That's actually how it worked out with me, my mom is a messy hoarder and I grew up like that, but by the time I moved in with my now-wife I just brought my plant, computer and a small amount of clothes :)
But my life would have been better if I was always neat and organized rather than figuring it out in my late 20s.
Conversely, they might just leave home and feel joy at the freedom to finally live how they want to live.
There's also something to be said for learning from the mistakes of others. I saw what smoking did to my grandfather. It destroyed his lungs and he slowly lost the ability to breathe. It robbed him of his strength, then his mobility, then his life. It made a stronger impression on me than a good role model ever could.
Perhaps you particularly appreciate the value of a good habit specifically because you saw the consequences of the opposite.
Yes. Tiberian Sun was the first PC game I owned and Westwood Online was the first service I needed a username for (aside from my email). It's been my handle since 1999.
It's their room but my house. Just like in my house I still have to follow the rules that my government puts on me, they have to follow the house rules. They have some autonomy as to how they want to do that, but they still have to follow the rules.
You don't have to go that far down history to find laws you disagree with. Do you sometimes drink alcohol? Have you ever went above the speed limit? Always done full complete stops? Always been on time at work? Life is full of rules we ought to follow. Doesn't mean we need to.
What about "I'm the adult, and you're the kid"? On the one hand, you do need to respect the child's personal living space, but on the other you have parental responsibility to ensure that 1) that space meets some established minimum quality of cleanliness and 2) the child learns enough cleaning/organizational skills to function as a member of society.
Obviously this is completely different when the child is a fully-grown adult--at that point, what they need is not a life lesson--but for a minor just beginning to learn how to be an adult, the parents must impose their will on their child to some extent for the child's own good.
As a parent, your job is to help your children become the best people they can be, not the people they'd turn out by default.
I would much rather my son hate me now and thank me later than the other way around.
To use this example - if your choice is to raise a child who is organized vs one who is a slob: aim for organized because it will help them down the road in many ways. It's not the most important thing, but leaving the kid to their own devices is just lazy.
Funny example - every woman I ever dated has a story of coming to a guy's apartment, seeing that it's gross, and turning around. So these men are literally missing out on sex/partnership opportunities because their parents didn't teach them to clean up their room. Thanks a lot mom and dad.
I'm sure those men could clean their rooms perfectly well if someone made them. Their problem isn't using the wrong solvents or mixing light and dark laundry. It's lacking the conscientiousness to do boring/unpleasant life admin work consistently when no one is making them. There may be ways for parents to impart this trait, but just making them is probably not it. Boys who clean because their mothers are angry become men who clean because their wives are angry.
FWIW my parents were 100% diligent about bedtime, nutrition, cleaning my room, etc. I threw it all to the wind as soon as I moved out for college. Predictably I felt like shit. But I had to go through those experiences of feeling like shit, and then noticing that the "responsible" behaviors helped, before I cared enough to prioritize them.
In other words, I see what my parents were trying to do. I see what so many parents are trying to do when they get into huge conflicts with their kids. Teach lessons that they learned firsthand, so that the kids can skip the unpleasant parts (being sleep deprived, living in filth, bad breakups, whatever) and just do everything right the first time. But it doesn't work that way. Everyone has to find out for themselves.
I don’t think I ever found the information or techniques challenging. I do think that having the prior experience of a “wholesome” life made it occur to me as a potential solution to malaise. It’s very sad that some kids never experience that baseline.
> There may be ways for parents to impart this trait, but just making them is probably not it. Boys who clean because their mothers are angry become men who clean because their wives are angry.
This is the point I was trying to make in my downvoted post - thank you for stating it more clearly than I was able to.
And as an adult, you can “own” your house, but you still have to abide by the greater rules of the society you live in.
Teenager in a house has to live within the rules. Homeowner within a HOA has to live within the rules. Homeowner within city limits has to live within the rules, etc.
> EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)
Just a general remark: If you're not a parent [1], don't tell others how to be parents. It's okay to ask questions (e.g., "why are you doing it like this instead of like that?"), but don't believe you know what you're talking about.
[1] "Parent" as in "functionally a parent", not necessarily "biologically a parent". If you're raising a child, you're a parent, even if they aren't your biological child.
1. That highly downvoted post looks like it's mostly questions to me.
2. It's hard to know how to properly instill good habits in a teenager. Even being a parent of a teen doesn't always mean you know how to do that, and being a parent of a non-teen is definitely not enough. So don't try to categorize parents in general as having this knowledge.
The last part about them being a joy to hang out with is crucial.
We need to remember we were like them once. They’re little extensions of us.
Whenever I have troubles with my kids I try to remember that I was a kid not that long ago. If I zoom out a little, it was just a blink. I’ll spend more of my life with my kids being adults, fate permitting, and the struggles of them figuring things out (and me as well) will be another blink. I really want to make the most of it.
I’m not a psychologist. All of my reflecting and self analyzing suggests current me and past me were basically the same people though. I’ve developed skills and my brain works better for certain things, but more or less the same person inside.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I was taught my entire life that I’d grow into something and certain things would happen that would make me an adult, and i suppose I inferred this would be transformative. Not really though. If I drop that inferred notion I almost find it freeing. I’m not a kid or an adult or anything besides “me”, whatever that needs to mean in the moment.
I feel western culture defines teen culture in a certain way and then 'teens' act in that way. Even now and in the past, you were see as an adult by 15.
Often by age 12 girls would be fully contributing household member doing all work done by adult women and by age 14-15 so would be boys doing everything an adult men would be doing.
Even now that's the case in many places in developing countries, teenagers act like complete adults in mannerism, thoughtfulness and responsibilities. Teenager is a phase that is a luxury, where despite being capable you use more than you bring/produce. In west, it gets you to be an adult without any consequences.
even though article rejects this, it’s because fathers don’t want daughters. that hits the hardest when daughters hit puberty and dads realize things are different
For all the bad press, I've found teenage boys easy to deal with. They get loud or break things but only by accident, they rarely mean any harm and are rapidly ready to apologise and mean it when they do. Put the breakables away, stick to a few simple rules, interact with them and ignore tactically and they'll be happy, productive and social.
Some rough housing helps a lot when they're younger too. 10 minutes of wrestling will buy you an hour of helping clean up or playing nicely with others.
> it is intriguing to note that Dr Kabatek and Dr Ribar found one type of couple who seem immune to the daughter effect: those in which the father grew up with a sister.
Can anyone with grown daughters and a sister speculate as to why this may be the case?
I'm wondering if men who have gone through this can suggest some of the ways in which having a sister changed how they interacted with their daughters or wives.
It isn't entirely clear from the brief mention in the article whether having had a sister changes how a man interacts with his wife or how he interacts with his daughter.
In my case, I was generally happy with how my parents raised us, looking back as an adult, and with the differences in how they approached my adolescent years and my sister's. I saw that my parents' relationship was challenged and ultimately strengthened by the challenge of raising both boys and girls. That strengthened my confidence in my ability to raise children with my wife while preserving and strengthening our marriage, and some small challenges have been eased by observing some of my parents' specific successes and failures. I don't know if I would have divorced had I been an only child, of course.
I have an older sister who was the first child, and my oldest child is currently a 13 year old girl.
Girls go through very negative emotions between ages 12 and 18. These can be very challenging for a family. PM me for details!
This 5-year-longitudinal study from the Netherlands backs up my anecdotal assertion, adolescents are difficult, girls are slightly worse, and it starts really horribly at 12/13 then eases off as they approach adulthood: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12...
We seem to be a self selecting group of mostly men here.. I would be interested in hearing from someone who had been a teenaged girl to hear the other side of this. It’s at the very least plausible that much of the conflict comes from the expectations that society places on young women.
I am a girl. My parents are still happily married. But no siblings so no drama.
They were (and kinda still are actually even though I’m nearly 30) hostile to boys though. Because of getting pregnant or falling madlessly in love with an idiot. Which always sounded ridiculous to me since I’ve disliked children from a very young age and was academically ambitious. And actually not very much versed in romantic activities either.
If parents are getting divorced because they are arguing about the upbringing of girls, why is this risk only materializing when the girl is the first child? Why would the dynamics be different if the girl was not the first child? Ergo, the conclusion is not thought through and likely to be false.
It cites a relative risk of only around 0.5-1% in the background literature, and only in the US. Although an interesting aggregate finding, for anyone considering their own relationship here it's likely to be lost in the noise of individual variation.
Male fetuses are more likely to die in the womb if the mother is stressed. Marriages are more likely to end if the marriage is stressful. Therefore, marriages with first born daughters are more likely to end with divorce, by no fault of the daughter.
Disclosure: I was once a first-born teenage daughter. Yes, my parents divorced.
They explicitly say it in the article (in the second paragraph, visible even to non-subscribers) that there is no correlation in the first years of life of the son/daughter. Interesting hypothesis but seems false from what I read in the article.
> But, unlike previous work, their study also looked at the effect of the girl’s age. It found that “daughter-divorce” risk emerges only in a first-born girl’s teenage years (see chart). Before they reach the age of 12, daughters are no more linked to couples splitting up than sons are.
Yes, exactly. That means that (assuming there are no other gender-dependent birth factors; this is not true but serves to make the point), we should expect to see slightly more females born than males. The 'surplus' females being born to mothers who were stressed enough that, had they conceived a male, the child would have self-aborted. Thus, assuming stress is correlated with divorce, those families are more likely to divorce.
Then how can you explain no correlation before the daughter has become a teenager? If I understood you correctly, you suggest that parents of daughters divorce more often because the daughter was born to a couple of stressed parents (which is more likely to happen than a boy born to that family). If that would be the only cause of the divorce (I'm oversimplyfying, of course), then there would be no difference whether the daughter is a teenager or not. Perhaps parents think of taking care of a child in their first years of life as a moral obligation, which would reduce the divorce rate. However, it's still suspicious that the divorce occurs around the time the daughter reaches puberty, not some time earlier (after she's 5 or something).
> If I understood you correctly, you suggest that parents of daughters divorce more often because the daughter was born to a couple of stressed parents
I don't. I was specifically responding to yellowbeard's comment, which read:
> Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.
Yellowbeard provided one explanation for the fact that, despite male fetuses being more likely to self-abort, there is no difference between divorce stats of young male and female children. My response said why that explanation was wrong. I wasn't saying that the self-abortion delta affects divorce ratios, only that it might.
(Indeed, I do expect that it does have an effect, but that that effect is miniscule and unlikely to be measurable.)
This doesn’t effect the result. They are comparing people with children. If you didn’t have children or aborted a child it’s the same as not getting married. You simply aren’t part of the study because you are irrelevant for the same reason that a kangaroo is irrelevant to the study.
A disproportionate amount of parents with first born daughters over sons is inconsequential because they are measuring the percentage of divorces for each population, not the total number of divorces for each population.
The logic she uses here is really far fetched and unlikely to be true so you really need statistical causal links in order to say anything substantial. I mean her disclosure also discloses a possible bias. She may not have the ability to admit that she her self was the causal factor in her own parents divorce.
It doesn’t. The difference is that all teenagers become difficult. But girls are often worse.
If parents have already seen a boy go through their teenage years, they’ll be better prepared for the grief a 12-year-old girl can cause.
Also, anecdotally, a close friend of mine had a very difficult older sister. The younger siblings witnessed her bad behaviour, and decided not to repeat the theatrics.
I wonder how much of bad teenage behavior is exacerbated by mandatory school attendance combined with the way secondary schools typically operate, which I seem to recall as being somewhere between day care, a factory, and a prison. Girls were often disciplined for "socializing" which I thought was one of the things you were supposed to learn in school.
Moreover, secondary school students live in a supposed democracy yet few actually have the right to vote on policies that affect them (not to mention taxes such as sales/use tax which are "taxation without representation.") Student "governments" typically have little to no actual power over school policies or the curriculum.
On the other hand, I have heard media pundits suggest that the current wave of youth crime is due in part to schools being closed. I'm not sure whether that supports or refutes the first paragraph.
p.s. Instead of downvotes on my speculation I'd prefer logical arguments and/or evidence one way or another. Then again this seems kind of off-topic for HN so it may not work well with the HN format anyway.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 367 ms ] threadThis to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't count the amount of times I've heard men how much they would worry if they'd be getting a daughter. It seems as if many people think a girl has to be parented differently - probably more intensely - compared to a boy who can apparently be left to his own devices more often.
I'm speculating here of course.
With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being.
I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
I would speculate it affects it in different ways. Social media puts young boys at risk of entering highly misogynistic spaces, the damage of which will be borne out on the bodies, careers, and wellbeing of women they meet later.
I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents.
It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave".
That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.
This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.
Statistically, if you are a parent with a child that is not emotionally OK, a son is more likely to kill himself, which is not reversible / recoverable. So at least while those stats remain true, the idea that girls need more emotional support is not backed up by the evidence I'm looking at.
Then of course there are things like treating him as normal multidimensional human as opposed to as emotionless competing machine as people in these HN theads write about boys. Like, the boys I know in real life are way more multifaceted people, they do have emotions and everything. They have relationship issues with regards to their friends. They do have to deal with bullying from their friends both physical and emotional. When young, they are not walking constantly fighting trouble people in this discussion describe. When teenagers, they are not only-cares-about sport and violent games kind of guys. Nor closes himself to his room and ignores the family which is actually supposed to be cool thing about boys kind of guys.
Reading gender sterotypes on HN about boys, one would believe it is impossible for boy to become artist, writer, scientist or philosopher. Except in real world, boys and men engage in all those. But really, median boy that live in my bubble is not destructive machine. There are few boys that do cause disproportional trouble, but majority of them are nice humans.
Back to girls, I would be careful to trust people who find all these attempts to "not be serious" at the time of trying. Majority of them is serious. People who act like they are not serious or just cry for attention that needs to be ignored are how girls dont get help they need.
Destruction is a normal part of adolescent behavior. I think many first time parents are just really surprised to see it manifest so strongly in their children, especially toddlers.
Most toddler destruction is cluelessness and the same toddler is sad and compassionate in other situations. Physically active toddler boys are noisy which is tiring, but they are also sweet and trying their best.
And all of that is irrelevant to effect from article, which manifest only in immigrant fathers and first born female child. And the effect is small.
So the divorce effect is likely way more about clash between cultural expectations of foreign born dads then about how horrible either boys or girls are.
Either way, clearly the boys need more intervention, in whatever form that takes.
I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not.
There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women.
Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
Men play sports, fight, kill each other and video games imitate life.
Social media is the women's version of video games, refined to weapons-grade purity.
I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along."
Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed.
Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career.
This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.
Additionally, this is a very anecdotal example which doesn't explain why reports are found as early as prepubescent girls. Reports stating girls on average do indeed feel more pressure from social media than boys do.
The only reason you see it this way is because of your previous point regarding women and children being a "package deal". There are societal expectations of men who have children.
>women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development
This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children". It's specialization and symbiosis. Women can benefit from "supporting" their husband's career. Ideally people support EACHOTHER in a relationship, and that includes tradeoffs in many areas of life, financial/career/societal/emotional/children.
>cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot
What a revelation. You're right, if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create. /sarcasm
That's maybe half a step away from a personal attack. That's not "my opinion." That's how society tends to treat things and that observation is based on lots of reading of stuff with solid studies behind it.
This is like saying "men tend to support their wives children at the expense of their own children".
No, it's not. Not at all. For one thing, two people can be married and have their own children separately from a previous relationship.
if only men could wrap their mind around this one then they might be able to fix all the issues that they maliciously create.
Give me a break. This is not a position I am a proponent of. I rarely talk about the so-called "patriarchy." I do not advocate an idea that sexism is rooted in men being intentionally malicious assholes and I don't think I ever have.
This is not a good faith engagement of the point at all.
The fact that women can have babies tends to impact the lives of all women, whether they want babies or not. They get a lot of social expectations hung on them that are rooted in the idea of father as breadwinner and mother as full-time parent in part because that's a model that is more reliable than mother as breadwinner and father as full-time parent.
By reliable, I mean it tends to withstand things going wrong that you can statistically bet on happening in some percentage of cases. Pregnancy can really seriously impact a woman's body and health in a way that becoming a father doesn't do to a man's body.
As just one really minor example, she can be incontinent for a time after the birth and need to account for that, which is tougher to deal with if you have a paid job than if you are a homemaker.
Women go through it in birth, I have never met a person who didn't acknowledge that birth is an absolutely painful and sometimes devastating process that is unique to women. Women die giving birth too. Should men feel ashamed for that? Maybe we should pass a law that makes it illegal to get a woman pregnant... After all she might die and if that happens then the evil man who impregnated her should be punished, right?
Oh wait, nobody understands that only women get pregnant, so I guess that's the first hurdle here. HEY EVERYBODY, ONLY WOMEN CAN GET PREGNANT! Maybe that should be the next study: "Human beings with two X chromosomes are 100% more likely to get pregnant than those with XY chromosomes".
Isn't the effect that one would use to support this, the same effect one sees if instead "women prefer to look after their children than immediately return to full-time work after child-birth"?
It seems that in Western democracies often women may [amongst other options] choose their own career vs. support a husband to enable greater closeness with children. Men seldom have that option.
Aside: "> and have her pick up after him": Father's who get no veto on abortion, or pregnancy get to live with the mother's choice. Sure, they share responsibility for the pregnancy too, but twisting that situation to (what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work' is going to need some hard proof if you're going to convince me that this isn't unwarranted sexism. I think you'll find men "bitch" about it because they're denied any say but are expected to pay because "a man's role is to work".
No. Well before there are children, women will fairly often do things like follow her husband or boyfriend to a new city when he gets a job offer there. When a person moves to a new city because they got a job offer there, they tend to be getting a promotion and a pay raise.
When a person moves to a new city to follow someone else and then start their own job hunt, they tend to be hurting their career and will typically get a less prestigious job with less pay than what they left. Do that sort of thing often enough along gendered lines and the cumulative effect is pretty harsh.
(what appears to be your contention, paraphrased) 'men bear a grudge against alimony because they can't enslave women for menial work'
Please don't do this. It's hard enough to participate here as a woman without someone intentionally twisting my comment in such an ugly manner.
It takes two people to create a baby. There is a long human history of placing various expectations on both men and women to account for that reality. The expectations related to that are long and varied and tend to be gendered, such as expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men.
The reason for expecting virginity for girls is it's a form of birth control and it's the only one that's really reliable and it wasn't that long ago it was the only one a lot of people really had ready access to.
One college, I think in the UK somewhere, used to give scholarships to "virgin girls" and their test historically was "a girl who had never been pregnant." They had to update their criteria at some point.
The last time I saw data on it, a "normal, healthy fertile woman" was defined as a woman who would get pregnant within a year if she was sexually active and not using protection.
Someone asked explicitly for "a personal perspective" and I gave some of that. The degree to which I am being given crap for having done that is quite aggravating.
You don't have to care what a woman thinks, but I give a woman's take here from time to time simply because this is an overwhelmingly male space and I post as openly female. Sometimes, that goes okay. Sometimes, it's appreciated and respected, but it's never an easy thing to do and it always opens me up to being given a ridiculous amount of crap for making a good faith statement.
It never matters how carefully I word it, someone will inevitably have a problem with a woman daring to give the female side of the equation here.
It always sucks when a baby is conceived that wasn't actively and intentionally wanted and planned by both parties. This is part of why there is so much societal baggage concerning human sexual stuff and why the entire world wants to be judgy about things like how many people you sleep with, did you do it before marriage, is it a serious relationship or a casual one and on and on and on.
That's not because women are awful bitches to men and it's not because men are awful bastards to women. It's because when 1 + 1 suddenly and unexpectedly = 3, that impacts many lives, not just the two poor fools who bumped uglies one night without thinking too much about it (as just one scenario -- I'm well aware there can be others).
I'm already finding this discussion amazingly tiresome on a day when I already feel incredibly raw about men being assholes to me, so I think I probably need to walk away. It's really, really hard to constantly be expected to be the one who worries about the feelings of nine zillion men on this forum while it sometimes seems like not a single soul gives a damn about me, my feelings, my life, my welfare -- anything.
So if people want to just downvote my comments to hel...
And vice-versa, do you feel there's some sexually skewed pressure here? Sadly for me I was the one who got a job first, so I won the chance to be stuck in a little box every day, yay!
> expecting women to be virgins on the wedding night but not expecting the same of men //
In the UK I think if you interviewed 10000 people you might get one that thinks that; honestly I've heard a lot of strange views but never anyone expressing virginity as a virtue only for women, it's always been for both sexes. I've no idea what you're leading towards or where you're getting this idea (assuming we're still talking Western Democracies)?
> It never matters how carefully I word it //
I hesitated to post that because you're one of the first people with a gendered name I've noticed, I don't notice many but overwhelmingly they're asexual names (temporal, rsync, whatever) and I've found your comments high value and definitely adding to the site in general. But, what did you mean there then, I couldn't work out a way in which it wasn't a terrible caricature.
You're complaining here about mistreatment, but you're dishing it too. You don't have to care about anyone's feelings to present your perspective - I don't know if you're getting downvoted, but ultimately it's fake internet points. Make your point ... but if you do it in a way that denigrates every divorced male then I think you've got to expect push-back.
> I can still count on getting openly hated on //
Disagreement ain't hate. I appreciate your posts, doesn't mean I don't disagree with some of their content.
I'm worried about this trend too. I saw an ad the other day that started with talking about how much time and effort women need to spend on beauty etc. My thought while watching this part was "This is horrible, we should encourage less of this."
But instead of this conclusion, the ad concluded with "If women have to put this much effort in, men should step up and start putting in more effort. Here's a product we make so men can put in more effort." I found it absurd!
"Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls"
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-...
These preferences are lasting into the second-generations, with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggest...
Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.
That's likely an unintended side effect of the change in western attitudes on integration, going from "conform" to "melting pot" and now to "cultural stew". The pressure to adapt to the new country's values is less than it used to be while it is also encouraged for cultural communities to form and persist. Beyond that, the revolution in cheap global communications likely as plays a role, as cultural values can be reinforced in the new country from the source country. It may be that the only way to change the attitudes towards gender in the Canadian-Indian community will be to change those attitudes in India itself. That of course gets us into the messy territory of cultural imperialism.
It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection).
I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.
Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
I honestly wonder at this and prefer to not take a stance as I have too little information. Watching some reflections from transgender people after their transitions may help. I’ve heard female to male trans report society treating men with much less care. Meanwhile I imagine women get a lot more engagement from society than men.
Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.
My parents and the parents of some of my depressed friends are not divorced, simply because divorce requires communication and a willingness to reflect upon the state of your marriage openly.
As I said, I might be biased, but I think the hidden outcome of "not legally, but emotionally divorced" makes up a significant portion of turbulent marriages.
Divorce does not always result in single-parent households.
Divorced parents can and do remarry.
Children not encountering lies, strife, or emotional disattachment on a daily basis anymore seems a significant improvement, however.
So the alternative of having one home and more access to both parents could be better for the child even if the parents don't get along with each other well.
As I recall, I didn’t take my parents’ daily fighting, even my mom screaming and throwing things, as much to heart as some might think. I’m glad you used the word access because that’s precisely what I valued most, and the biggest loss. Second to that was the devastating financial strain (2 apartments, 2 cars, etc but same income).
Of they can be used as such.
And the main issue with single parents is income/income instability (which is why there are focused benefits in many countries for single parents). As ever, an income issue gets classed as something else.
Very well could be a good idea. If the father was in jail because of some youthful drug offenses, it could very well be that he could still be a devoted and loving parent and no danger whatsoever to the child.
How is this even a question, never the less the most upvoted comment?
No, divorce is not a healthy end to a marriage.
There are two ways to think about this.
The first is that once your car gets too broken to repair, you should just ditch it and get a new one.
The other is that once your arm/ankle/hip/liver has problems, you should just transplant a new one instead of doing physical therapy/exercise/eating healthier/drinking less.
In my experience, marriage is much closer to the latter situation than the former.
If you're curious what those "fixes" are for the latter, see https://www.gottman.com/product/the-seven-principles-for-mak....
There are, of course, many situations where divorce is not the right answer for that situation, just like there are many situations for which a hip replacement is not the right answer. But it is within the set of potential right answers across all situations. There's no sense in trying to replace what is easily repairable, and there's also no sense in spending your life trying to repair what needs to be replaced.
And it's totally possible to go through life where neither you nor anyone you know ought to get a divorce - just like it's totally possible to go through life knowing nobody who needs a hip replacement, but that is hardly evidence that the procedure is the wrong answer for everyone!
That's also the generation of people who don't go to the hospital because anything hurts. They go to the hospital 5 years later for something unrelated, when it's discovered it's 4 years too late to do anything about it.
This is unhelpfully extending the metaphor into a straw man. It's simple enough to see the point.
In your example, your ankle is under your control - if you want to exercise it, you can. Your ankle doesn't actively sabotage your body (or if it does spread infection/etc, amputation is often used).
A marriage depends on two people working together to build a life together. If one person is not willing to put in that effort, the marriage fails.
Because marriage is intended as an act of lifetime committent to what is seen as a positive relationship, and so failing this original intent can never be a measure of success.. Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'.
Bad people don't tend to go around being bad unless they think they can get away with it. Once someone has pinky swore to dedicate their life to them, no matter what they might do, the true colors come out. I've seen it too many times, the idea does more harm than good.
Life-long good marriages exists, I hope to achieve one myself, but the silly oath doesn't help them in any way, and it makes the bad ones worse.
"Preferable to 'failing' in the sense of staying in a 'failed marriage' (where the 'positive relationship' is no more positive) perhaps, but both of these are 'failures'. "
> Life-long good marriages exists
I'm sure you have this reconciled somehow, but it sounds contradictory to me.
Maybe if the oaths contained an "unless you become an asshole" clause, they'd be more valuable.
sigh.
For most of history marriage was property transfer, let's not pretend it's something more romantic than it is.
Failing to see how this debunks either 'lifetime committment' or 'positive relationship' which are the only logical assertions I made - I did not attempt to qualify how to ascertain 'positive'; financial benefit can also be construed as 'positive'.
If you're married to someone you don't want to be married to, sure sometimes things just don't work out.
If you're a kid and your parents failed marriage is destroying your life, I don't think "sometimes things just don't work out" is the answer.
I guess if you discount the "for better and for worse" part of the vows you take to one another....
Also, realize that people don’t generally get to a divorce by talking things out and figuring divorce is the only option. Even if they do talk things out it’s usually only after divorce is inevitable.
Is this often the outcome of divorce? I imagine that spending more time apart should reduce the total volume of conflict
I think they have a point.
It would be useful for me that I have some way to assign certain rights relating to me, to someone else.
I am not married, but I have been living with someone for 12 years, and neither of us has plans to change.
But legally, I don't know what happens when one of us meets a misfortune and the other needs to speak for us. Luckily in our case, we both have plenty of other blood relatives all alive and reachable and all on good terms with each other.
So, if say I am incapacitated, and some functionary at a hospital won't accept my partners decision about what to do, both my partner and the functionary can reach several other generally accepted proxies in the form of my mother, my brother, and even more cousins. My partner will be able to say what to do only slightly indirectly if not directly.
And we both have our own jobs with insurance and retirement savings so neither of us really needs to be legally acknowledged to receive benefits like military death benefits or retirements etc.
So for us we can pretty much get away with having NOT addressed these issues.
But they are real issues that generally should be addressed. A legal document on the books would provide a clean path to resolve a lot of potentially messy situations. What if our families didn't all like or respect each other? What if one or both of us had no known and/or reachable bood relatives? What if one of us actually needed to be recognized as a claimant on the others insurance or retirement or property like a house?
Probably a lot of such things could just as well be handled with legal documents other than marriages. Like if I take a job that has spouse insurance benefits, that could just as well be whoever I want to write on that form, rather than having it be determined by my marriage document.
But it would still be useful to have a catch-all document that expresses my wishes in any situation not handled elsewhere.
Simple counterexample: the USSR's views on gay marriage.
Says who? Every country I've lived in has provisions for ending marriages, so clearly it's not the only path.
>It's right there in the vows.
What vows? Nobody in my family is religious, none of us made any claims about being together until death. And even then, lots of religions allow for divorce, even some sects of Christianity...
In many cultures people make wedding vows about staying married until one of you dies.
I think the distinction should be socio-cultural: if you don’t accept that this civil union is “till death do us part”, then by definition it shouldn’t be marriage - it’s a civil union. All the same benefits of marriage with none of the cultural components.
It's not my responsibility to advertise my belief system to you.
The state shouldn't be in the business of certifying christenings or bar mitzvahs, nor should it be in the business of marriage for the same exact reasons.
> Nobody in my family is religious
point is out of place (because whether the family is religious seems to have little relevance)
I think it’s not so much people take it lightly, as that they have no idea of what they are getting into and what kind of work a modern marriage involves.
I am divorced, and got married in my country outside the church. Wether we like it or not, it was literally a contract. An officer of the court was there, read the 'contract' which states our data, the legal parts of it (prenup, how assets were after marriage, etc), and the legal responsibilities. There was nothing there about 'until the end' or the likes.
I'm not sure how it is in other countries, and I am from a very catholic country, but most people don't realize that marriage is the contract that is governed by the government's law and not any vows or whatever the priest says in church. It is a contract and parties to that contract are allowed to change their mind and divorce (break contract).
It sounds horribly complicated. How do assets and dependents get treated? How does a will work? An inheritance?
Eg You marry for 5 years, and at 4.9 a relative leaves an inheritance. The executors get to work at 5.1 years. Where does the money go?
Maybe I’m overthinking it.
https://topnews.in/how-about-fixedterm-marital-contract-rene...
I don’t recall the exact numbers but even just considering how many sexual partners people have can drastically change average likelihood of eventually divorce - with virgin couples above 80% AFAIK (some overlap with religious communities likely). Even a few decades ago when survival was still pretty easy marriage had higher success rates.
The culture probably has a lot more to do with the rate of successful marriages than our safety or lifespan
But parents aren't just two people. Life outcomes for the children of divorced parents are significantly worse than for children whose parents remain together.
Yes, they still are. And parents that stay together in an unhealthy relationship can do more harm to their children than separating.
But as for the life outcomes of divorced children? That's quantifiable and the data simply disagree with you.
"The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and Children" (Amato & Irving, 2005), even has in it's introduction:
"Available research suggests that these associations are partly spurious (due to selection effects) and partly due to the stress associated with marital disruption."
https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/180281
But on the other hand, upper-middle-class Hacker Newsers who got divorced because they were "unfulfilled" probably shouldn't point to extreme cases of abuse and neglect to justify their decision, either.
All things being equal, people in this latter category should try to work it out. (Nobody disputes that there are extreme environments for which divorce is the only option.)
Finally, as always, we are talking about averages. Sociology doesn't have a proof-by-counterexample. If I say, "poverty leads to worse outcomes for kids" it's not a legitimate response to say, "there are some wealthy kids who do bad and some poor kids who do well, so you're wrong."
We're always talking about averages.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6462058/
It's of course not healthy to end a healthy relationship. But hey, water is wet.
In those cases, is the tragedy that the marriage ended, or would the tragedy be if it remained?
Who wants to have a dysfunctional marriage? That seems like a bad ending too
So we can add ‘dysfunctional marriage’ to divorce as undesirable outcomes of marriage
Lol.
I think the original comment was referring to divorce being a better outcome in a failed relationship. There are a lot of failed relationships that continue to raise their kids in a disfunctional way and that is not good. A couple who divorces and are on good terms afterwards when raisig their children is way healthier.
Game theory should always be asked when biology is involved. I am not sure myself on the answer, but it seems more plausible than the article's "teenage girls are annoying" theory or the speculated "son preference" theory. If there is an optimal strategy, such a strategy may result in a small biological effect which makes parents look for a new chance of reproduction once the majority of child investment is done, resulting in the statistical data that shows 20.12% becoming 20.48%.
I remembered a case of of a obstetrician impregnating multiple patients but a Google search(1) easily proved this was not an isolated case as the first few links are all separate incidents.
(1) https://www.google.com/search?q=obstetrician+used+own+sperm
As immoral as this strategy sounds I admit it is probably the most effective strategy from an investment/returns pov. It is cheaper than becoming Genghis Khan(2) and the effect is comparable.
(2) https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...
Humans with our great variations of behaviors has both pair bonding behavior and non-pair bonding behavior, with genes that code for both. If one strategy was always superior to the other then we would have settled for it a long time ago.
(Its a law or something when talking about genes that the behavior is always a gene-enivorment interaction, and there are likely many more factors that influence pair bonding behavior).
"R-selectors" have many offspring, investing fairly litle in each one. K-selectors have a few offspring, but invest a lot of time/resources in caring for each. There's a bit more to it than that--and the theory has needed some adjustment, but...
It's unfair to expect two humans to remain compatible their entire lives. We evolve massively. A person i would have married at 18 is not the same i'd marry now.
Which isn't to say that difficulty should be met with break ups. Rather, it's to say that some marriages should end. Both parties would be better off. Other marriages would be better served to have problems met, worked through, and the couple made stronger as a result.
It is a healthy end. If it's a bad marriage.
People don't just become incompatible. Something went badly wrong for that to happen. It's increasingly common nowadays - nuclear families tend to be more atomized, rather than integrated into an extended family, which increases the stress on the relationship, and many people simply don't prioritize their marriage, but instead their career, kids, or lifestyle. And of course, the modern social environment is more full of distractions and temptations than ever.
For example, if one or both of them prioritize their careers over their marriage, and spend no more than an hour or two a day even in the other's presence, let alone quality time, for years on end, because they're busy at work or with something else...it's entirely predictable that they grow apart. That was the failure. They chose economics or the corporate ladder or an app that's changing the world or...over their marriage.
To you. But not so for many people, i imagine. I think the rate of divorce in America would suggest otherwise. Not to say that those are all healthy individuals, but that description sounds like a very religious-centric outlook on an often secular behavior.
In this framing, i'd argue that the liability of marriage should be thought of as "until death", but still. Sometimes the person you become is not something to be accepted nor desired by your loved ones. So who is to blame?
Do you change who you are? Or does your loved one change what they love? Sometimes both are unfair questions.
People evolve and so too should marriages.
This doesn’t pass the universality test - would it be positive if all marriages ended in divorce?
Lots of “bad” outcomes become good given circumstances, but they are still not universally good:
“Amputation can be a positive outcome, especially if gangrene has started”
If most people married just to have children and raise them, then divorced, that doesn’t seem bad in the slightest, especially given that’s the likely the original motivating force behind marriage anyway.
Sunlight makes you feel good, gives you vitamin D, and warms you up. Too much sunlight gives you skin cancer.
Sugar is necessary for life. Too much sugar gives you diabetes and obesity.
Water is the basic building block of life. Too much water causes electrolyte imbalances that can lead to dangerous cardiac arrythmias.
Very few good things actually do pass the universality test, which suggests that the test itself may be flawed.
People tend to associate single-parenthood as source of many problems based on statistics. But I wonder if those are simply correlation and not causation. i.e. people with certain traits are more prone to get divorced, and it could be those traits, and not divorce itself causes most other issues in their children. But it's easier to measure divorce rates than personality traits.
Isn't bankrupcy a pretty healthy outcome to a business?
Isn't death a pretty healthy outcome to life?
Isn't coup a pretty healthy outcome to a country?
Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
I don't know much about the other ones but segfault is definitely healthier than a buggy program being allowed to write at address 0 or continuing arithmetics after division by 0.
IIRC it took PHP quite many versions to get there (if it even has).
Pardon the snark: http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/318
>> Isn't segfault a pretty healthy outcome to program?
Found the Erlang user.
Absolutely, especially when the alternative is financial ruin because you didn’t take legal remedies available to you.
People get caught up in absolutes because they fit in a nice box, but most of the time life is messier.
I mean, since it's the inevitable end result no matter what actions one takes in their life, yes?
I remember when Firefox's crash recovery got so good, and its normal shutdown process took so long, that someone suggested that it should just crash when the user hit the exit button.
Kind of like saying the most healthy outcome is getting fired or rage quitting. It could be but once you found the job you signed a contract for life for, retiring is the healthiest outcome.
> Kind of like saying the most healthy outcome is getting fired or rage quitting
I don't agree, a closer analogy (keeping in mind that all analogies have limits) would be to say that a _pretty_ good outcome to taking a job is to quit. Which doesn't seem particularly controversial, there's plenty of situations where quitting is a perfectly reasonable and healthy choice, even if you don't have an abusive relationship with your workplace.
Relationship-wise, if you're a woman, no. Odds are if you're getting divorced as a woman past her 30s, it'll be harder for you to find a partner as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband). Especially if you're a single mother. High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids.
So, imo, divorce can be so lose-lose unless the man and woman are both past 50s. At that point, the kids are grown up and both partners are hopefully financially secure without the need of one another.
Generally I agree. There are exceptions, especially if the biological father is totally out of the equation. A friend married a woman who already had a kid. Father had vanished, had no interest. He legally adopted the kid, and they had several more together, he considers them all as his own.
I feel like we just went back in time 80 years. No, women don't need to spend their 20's finding a husband. They can have also go to school, volunteer, have friends, start a career. You know - the things men can do.
> High-quality men have no desire to raise someone else's kids
What does this even mean? Let me guess - you are a high-quality man?
This comment is so backwards.
Notice that the comment never mentioned that men shouldn't divorce because they are past their 20s when they should be finding a wife.
Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.
GP's comment is less valid because it is from an era where women were less-than.
It's generally considered a fact that women have a slightly (statistically) more difficult time than men to find a partner after their 20s (and the reverse is true - men have it tougher in their 20s compared to women), and GP's comment is discussing why that complicates things wrt divorce.
> Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.
I think that "high quality" means that they don't want to be second best to another man/woman. Totally understandable.
> Notice that the comment never mentioned that men shouldn't divorce because they are past their 20s when they should be finding a wife.
> Notice that the comment never mentions that high-quality women would never want to raise someone else's kid.
> GP's comment is less valid because it is from an era where women were less-than.
In what world do you live in where on average older women are considered more desirable partners than older men? By and large men are attracted to looks (or they prioritize looks a lot more than other qualities) while women are attracted to a set of qualities besides looks (or they prioritize other qualities a lot more than looks).
You can argue that's sexist and old-fashioned, but that's just how attraction works. Good luck changing the world!
There is a deal of sex-based difference here: being an older mother is harmful for the mother and the child; being an older father is far, far, less so (older fathers might be better for their kids?). Young women can choose a mate from all ages of men. Young men need to choose a mate -- if they wish to procreate I mean -- from the pool of fertile and healthy younger women. Medical science has eroded a little of that difference, but it still starts to get dangerous for women to fall pregnant in their late-30s.
An example of how that difference plays out is that in a childless couple at age 50 the woman basically has no chance to have children of her own, but the male could quite reasonably be expected to be fertile for a couple more decades. Thus, if a couple are unable to procreate and the male wishes to do so, then there is a tension; a biological impetus towards them leaving their wife and finding another partner.
A divorce can be new start, and life has much more to offer than ‘choosing your mate’
Nothing in GP's comment suggests ~that women should spend their twenties finding a husband~ (EDIT: I missed that sentence in the original comment), nor that they shouldn't do the things you just mentioned.
I don't understand how this is in any way apropos.
That is in fact exactly what the comment seems to suggest, in these lines.
> as opposed to when you were in your 20s (when the woman should be finding a potential husband
room500's response was exactly what I had in mind too, when I was reading the parent comment.
It very much feels like the GP had something specific in mind for "high-quality" that insinuates that caring for someone else's children is not a high quality thing to do.
I believe that quality is not what they are showing when they focus the comment on what women "should be doing", or if they're still seeing it as "someone else's kids".
On the matter of kids and "high quality", I made no comment on that earlier, and I make no comment now.
Women’s attractiveness starts declining in her late 20’s much faster than it does for men. We shouldn’t pretend like it doesn’t, and pretend like we don’t understand why women in their 30’s can’t find Mr. Right.
I might even venture to say that having the heart to care well for children who are not genetically your own is part of being a high quality man.
Based on the actions of my male friends and accounts I’ve read about dating as a single mom in their 30s, I assume the above is true.
If marriage is nothing more than a legal contract - which sadly for many people it is, then why even bother making vows such as "until death do us part"? All for show? Why not just put a time-clause for when the contract expires so that you can decide whether to sign a new one? A highly utilitarian, and in my opinion, tragically sad view of marriage, but that is essentially what it has become for many people.
The end of a marriage (where both participants continue living) and a cancer death, are not comparable.
Your "if you're not going to stay in a bad marriage until you physically die, what's the point of marriage?" viewpoint where marriage is permanent xor utilitarian is a false dichotomy.
Divorce doesn't mean that the participants failed, or that they entered into the marriage simply out of utility.
On the contrary, by their own measure, it is a failure. No one gets married anticipating or wanting a divorce. Everyone wants it to last forever.
That's why the comment you responded to suggested a time-bounded contract. Which no one wants.
Have you ever gone through a divorce? Mine was amicable, but even then it was the worst thing I've ever experienced.
I think the existence of reasonable precautions such as prenuptial agreements indicates that this statement is false: many people enter into a marriage with the full knowledge that it may end before the death of one of the partners (presumably contrary to their desire at the time). I think that counts as "anticipating".
Heinlein put it well: "We always marry strangers."
Only 5% of all married couples in the United States got married with a prenup. The fact that signing a prenup is so completely in everyone's interest and the fact that only 5% of marriages have them proves my point - no one is anticipating or looking forward to their own divorce.
Heinlein put it well: "We always marry strangers."
He was married 3 times. I'd be willing to bet he had 2 of those divorces behind him when he wrote that.
When my spouse and I got married, we had basically no assets of note. (Drafting and) Signing a prenup would have been in the interest of our lawyers, but not our interest.
That’s one in twenty.
Many enter marriages very optimistically and with a limited view of what it will become. People change, learn more about themselves and their partners, and kids are a powerful dynamic adding a lot of stress and needs. I don't think it's constructive to judge any divorce without having lived through that relationship first.
That's true but nobody was arguing that. The disagreement wasn't about whether they are failures (a description) but whether they failed (an action). I would say they definitely failed.
But you wouldn't say "amputating a leg is a healthy end to having legs" because for most leg havers, there are better outcomes.
In the same vein, I'd say "divorce is a healthy end to a bad marriage" but not "divorce is a healthy end to marriages in general".
In other words, I think it’s reasonable to say that divorce is a healthy way to end a marriage, because if it ended in divorce, then by definition, at least one party thought it needed to, making it a bad marriage.
Most middle class folks I am sure don't fall in third bucket; and a lot of them are just doing 9-5 jobs, probably not doing something which can drive them like say most of the big entrepreneurs or researchers seem to be.
So that leaves love, which would become kind of very important to give their life a meaning. Marriage being a vow to have that love lasting throughout seems special. I am in late 20s, and even though I would want to do something great, the strive to find someone compatible with me seems to weigh on my mind more these days.
If people thought of marriage as nothing but a legal contract, likely to be broken, and acted rationally then I expect they wouldn’t bother at all: the benefits aren’t particularly great while the risks are large.
I think we probably mostly agree with our own opinions but perhaps disagree on the opinions of others.
I read it as people taking that step in a relationship without much thought because that's what society has conditioned us to believe is normal and then divorcing like breaking-up.
Marriage brings specific legal and financial benefits, depending on the country (married couples tax allowances, spousal rights to pensions and inheritance etc, spousal privilege in court, visa/residency rights, child custody rights).
As these benefits have reduced over a few decades, the number of marriages has gone down (at least in the West?). I don't think that's a coincidence.
You don't need a legal marriage to share a loving and fulfilling life together with a partner. But, if you do share a loving and fulfilling life together, marriage might benefit you for one or more of the above reasons.
I would say the most sensible thing is simply the mutual declaration for the sake of administrivia, that until any of the members of a marriage say otherwise, we all are married. The only reason to even have the document is just for things like power of attorney. Who shall be considered a legal guardian responsible for a child, who is allowed to make decisions for another while they are incapacitated, etc. And the expiration date is "until further notice".
I don't think you have a right to call that sort of family sad or "tragic".
That's actually incredibly insulting, even abusive when it's embedded in policy that everyone has to live under.
Just imagine if I called your family sad and tragic. Even if I used hard unavoidable data to back up the judgement.
Everyone doesn't have to "live under" it, you don't have to get married.
I suspect having Mummy and Daddy being together "until further notice" would have disastrous impacts on children's sense of permanence and development.
While obviously not that consistent, as a kid I perfectly accepted that logic. If I try to place myself in that same mindset, I think I’d find the definition of “marriage is together until further notice” far more concerning than knowing some divorced parents.
Clearly civil mariage is just a contact, whose main purpose is the divorce (at least in my country - France - divorce is the main benefit of marriage). And as far as I know there is no commitment for it to last for life, but just until the end of the contract.
...what? Are you saying French people intentionally get married in order to reap benefits of divorce?
For example if they have kids and one of the parent stops working to raise the kids, divorce will make sure that person is not left without anything.
There is another civil union (the PACS) and as far as I know the main (and maybe only) differences is that PACS do not get divorce (you can part much more quickly, each party just get their own stuff and that's it) and something related to ineritance taxes. So that's the main reasons why people marry I guess :)
To be fair, I'll add that it's also not legal to marry religiously if you are not married civilly, so some people probably get married civilly just to be able to marry religiously.
It isn't the divorce which creates those rights, it is the marriage. The divorce rules only make it so that those rights are not abruptly suppressed after the dissolution of the marriage.
If you are married for some years in a state without common law marriage and then get divorced, you are probably due some of the house value, for example, even if it was in your husband's name. And one of the cars, and so on.
The same couple, not married, might have to sue to get one of the two cars and might not get any value from the house, even though they helped save for the down payment.
And there are lots of little things like that.
What if your analogy is right and marriage is really not healthy in the first place? At least it cannot work for all people?
>If marriage is nothing more than a legal contract - which sadly for many people it is, then why even bother making vows such as "until death do us part"?
It could be a legal contract with such timing: “until death” why not? Wasn’t it always has been like this by definition?
>All for show? If contract is not taken seriously then any contract become ‘for show’
>Why not just put a time-clause for when the contract expires so that you can decide whether to sign a new one?
Because it would make it opposite to what it meant to represent? Anyway, why to bother if many people consider it breakable at any moment already? Much more comfortable for those who do not intend to keep own promises.
>A highly utilitarian, and in my opinion, tragically sad view of marriage, but that is essentially what it has become for many people.
Has become? What if it always has been like this by design And many attempts to make it something else have failed?
Divorce is a positive resolution to a terrible relationship. Death isn't a positive resolution to cancer.
Divorce is only negative if we don't condition on the existence of a terrible relationship.
Two things are accurate at the same time:
- A marriage turning into a terrible relationship is a negative outcome.
- Divorce as a reaction to a marriage turning sour is a positive outcome, since we've conditioned on that development and it's now a sunk cost.
- Fixing a marriage which is turning into a terrible relationship is a better outcome than divorce. In this way, divorce is a bad outcome, the same way as coming in second in Jeopardy and winning $2000 is a bad outcome compared to coming in first and winning (say) $10 000.
It seems weird to say "well you signed some papers, so it's extremely valuable that you're together for some legal purposes rather then happy".
The point of repairing a relationship is to remember that you once were happy and can be again by correcting behaviors and the like. But it seems bizarre to assume that's assured - it's even more bizarre to think it would be wrong to acknowledge that maybe you'd only wind up content but not happy, and so a separation is still preferable.
Or that actually you'd be happier alone then with someone else, but not exactly miserable if you were still with them etc.
Not "only". A positive relationship that's ruined by outside factors/factions, for example, might end in divorce.
A relationship that benefits both people but has been mismanaged (ignorance, inexperience, etc.), might end in divorce.
Isn't the point of the OP in part that just by the biological accident of having female offspring one might become more likely to be divorced; that strongly implies that divorce isn't always down to inherent aspects of the relationship.
not sure about that.
To those who say life has inherent value, death is not positive, no matter the pain it may relieve. To those who say marriage has inherent value, divorce is not positive, no matter the pain it may relieve.
To turn your argument back on you: Death as a reaction to health/life turning sour is a positive outcome, since we've conditioned on that development and it's now a sunk cost.
I happen to think that both life and marriage are inherently valuable and worth sacrificing for and holding on to, and for similar reasons.
Marriage made sense when the population was sparse, the parents needed workforce, and the woman needed protection. Most of that doesn't apply today. Marriage is mostly a "reliquat" from former society's traditions.
A marriage is an enterprise two people join in together, and then go through life doing the really important work of raising children and supporting each other.
Ideally this is accompanied by deep love and passion etc. Short of that, it's done with deep mutual commitment and appreciation of the other person and the work you're doing together.
Way shittier down the line are relationships plagued with resentment and mistrust, that in my experience have more to do with what the people bring into the relationship than their partner (basically: if both people are sane and enter thoughtfully into the marriage, you should not end up here.)
Once you're in that mode, where you don't have it together to work it out and grow together, sure divorce is happier than eternal rancor and abuse, but it's super-down the line.
I think this is important to understand because once you do, you're much more thoughtful about what you're getting into in the first place. I guess it's easier said for me because I married in my later 30s and had the life experience and introspection to know what I want and need and to appreciate my wife (who is different than me in ways that a less mature version of me might resent rather than appreciate)
This might be a bit of a trope, but it is at this exact moment that some couples have kids (like my parents did).
Having not been born yet, that was not very down the line from my point of view at all.
Do you have any evidence of this? As someone from a Muslim country, my family universally has stayed in bad marriages. My wife, an American, has a family rife with divorce. (Not just her parents, but the whole community. Many people don’t really realize this—among those with college degrees, almost 80% of marriages will last 20+ years. But among those with just a high school diploma, it’s just 40%. In lower middle class communities, kids with parents who are divorced are the norm.)
It’s not clear to me which one is better for the parents. But unhappy parents seems superior to divorced ones for the kids. The financial and structural disruption on kids from divorce is massive. It’s not just individual, it’s the whole community. In the lower middle class communities where my wife’s family is from, divorce is the norm. And I can see kids suffering from the disruption, and wanting stability, but having no role models and no guidance because most people around them are divorced.
This is obviously anecdotal. I’d be curious to see data—to my knowledge this hasn’t been studied rigorously. To me, the notion that “divorce is a fine outcome for marriage” is something that is counter intuitive enough to require some evidence.
I find it hard to imagine a child growing up in a house with two parents who treat each other like shit is worse off than one with a single parent, but who knows?
Look, I’m not talking about abusive marriages. For people without a college degree, 60% of marriages will end before the kids are independent and in their own two feet. Most of those don’t involve involve abuse.
> but do people get into that much financial trouble from divorce usually?
Yes. For the average middle class family, having to split into two households is incredibly financially disruptive. Most middle class couples aren’t in a position where one person can take over the housing payment alone. That means moving, potentially changing schools, etc. And there’s a ton of other shared expenses that each parent now has to pay separately.
> What about child support?
For a non-college educated man making the median $36,000 a year, child support here in Maryland works out to $567 per month. That doesn’t come close to offsetting the support of the other householder.
Median household income in my county is $80,000/year. That’s a bit under $5,300 month take home for a married couple. Which is fine—you can buy a 4BR house here in a good school district for $1,450 per month in mortgage. But no way the couple can afford to keep the house if they get divorced. Rent alone in a studio will be $750/month. (Like most normal places, it’s much more expensive to rent here than buy.) Even if the spouse moving out lives like a pauper that’s realistically a $1,500/month hole in the budget few families can cover. So Dad moves into a studio, mom and the kids move into a cheap 2BR, and you’re paying like $1,750 month for housing (total) because you’ve given up the cost advantages of home ownership. And say there is another $750 in new non-shared expenses. So that’s $1,000/month that’s no longer there that was going towards savings/college/enrichment activities, etc. They’ve traded a 4BR house in a nice suburb for two households that are struggling to get by and have no margin. If they’re lucky, the kids got to stay in the same school district, but they’ve probably been taken away from their neighborhood friends. This happened my step siblings in law recently. It’s extremely shitty.
Divorced parents are vastly superior to unhappy parents for the happiness and outcomes of the children.
Some relationships absolutely cause less destruction by ending. Some provide sufficiently despite great flaws.
My culture (and that of like 3/4 of the world’s population) says that’s a bad thing for kids and society as a whole. I used to think westerners were enlightened and had the right idea on allowing and encouraging individual freedom in this area, but now I think they’ve got it wrong. And it’s hard to really know without focusing on what’s been the aggregate effect.
But if they can't get along, I'm sure it's terrible. Just like if the parents stay together?
I created a new account in case this gets indexed somewhere. I am in my 30s and my own parents are still married, but they should have gotten divorced a long time ago. They never did, "because of the kids" and it pains me. They are fucking miserable. I have not seen them lovingly kiss each other in at least 3 decades (I only remember once when I was a toddler). They do not have intercourse of any kind, sleep in separate bedrooms, fight constantly, my dad has been having affairs (unsure if my mom knows about them, I doubt it would change anything if she did), all because they are too ashamed to get divorced, and at this point, they're too old to do it.
Of course looking in from the outside they seem like a happy couple - always went to social functions together, etc. But on the inside, definitely not. I always wonder once you take out the marriages that end in divorce, how many of the ones left are like my parents - happy on the outside, fucking miserable on the inside. In my own experience, the vast majority of friends' parents have been divorced, sometimes multiple times, and I already have friends my age who were married and divorced.
Needless to say, I am in no rush to get married, even in my 30s. I do have relationships when it's right, but I don't let society tell me if or when I should be getting married, if ever. It's way too big a risk to my personal happiness.
There’s value in knowing who’s going to care for you when you get cancer, even if there’s a lot of animosity now.
It's a bit of a provocative way of saying things, but I am surprised at how conservative (in the social sense, not political) the other comments are, defending traditional family values and arguing that divorce is always a failure
Divorce can _absolutely_ be a healthy outcome to a marriage. If your marriage doesn't work after a time, the healthy option is to stop it. You can argue that you should try to "save your marriage"... but if neither you or your partner really wants to, why would you have this duty to try and salvage it rather than move on? At least if you don't have kids, as divorce tends to have bad impact on them apparently, although I think it's mostly because they're brought up in a society that teaches that divorce is failure and that a family is a mom and a dad.
Of course nobody is saying that divorce is "the most healthy" outcome, it's just "pretty healthy" in a whole range of situation, though not all. And there's divorce and divorce: sometimes it involves incredible drama, fighting and stress (not very healthy, although staying married probably would be worse in this case), and sometimes it's smooth, shake hands and go your own way.
Anecdotally: my parents divorced when I was ~15. It was smooth as far as I could see, although I imagine that unfun things happened that led to this. It made absolutely no difference to me, and I saw them bloom and be happier than I ever saw them: my father went from being a 9-5 robot to doing sports, be involved in local associations and take an unexpected interest in african art. My mom started doing photography and developped a passion for dance. I entirely credit their divorce for how much happier and interesting they got!
If you get all your input from non-engineering journalists, comedians, talking heads, etc, you may never encounter any differing opinions; just as if 100 years ago you'd have believed divorce is always bad from those same people, and been surprised at what engineers said about how it can be occasionally a good thing.
Could be and then it would mean marriage is not ‘healthy’ in the first place? Which could be by the way.
What if it’s so by design? I mean it’s very difficult to come up with one design that works for ‘all’. Not a trivial task I would say and isn’t it destine for failure?
i guess it isn't very healthy for the kids. http://marripedia.org/effects_of_divorce_on_children_s_healt...
Perhaps ‘Outcomes for children of parents who went to marriage counselling’
Even then, couples that get counselling are probably a healthier subset of all marriages than would make for an ideal reference.
It's explicitly the outcome almost every married couple agrees they don't want upfront. So something has failed by that point.
It's not unhealthy in the sense that no one gets sick or physically injured I suppose?
This is definitely one of the more bizarre things I've ever seen written on here.
Also, as a survival of an abusive home, “daughters provoke...” sounds like blaming children for their parents dysfunction. Maybe that wasn’t the intent of the OP. However kids blaming themselves for their parents problems is a pathology many kids that went through these situations have to work to overcome. Any culpability belongs to the grown ups who couldn’t resolve their issues and put the kids first.
Rather than divorce, the daughter went to a private school, then to live with relatives in another country.
Ok, so 0.36% of couples divorce over having a girl, and it only happens when the girl reaches puberty. This could just be the cases where the dad sexually assaults the girl and the mom finds out and divorces him, the numbers are small enough for me to believe that is possible at least.
Your insight was so good and the conclusion was so radical!
Why wasn't your conclusion: Or the numbers are small enough that its a rounding error of which no conclusion can be derived.
A couple of percent of girls gets sexually harassed by their biological dads, that is more than enough to believably explain the discrepancy in divorce. The fact that it only happens when the girls reaches puberty reinforces my interpretation. The researchers in this study didn't research why the difference exists, so my interpretation is as good as theirs.
Because your comment and others are grasping at demonizing one thing in a fairly sexually prejudiced ways, prejudiced because the assumptions don't factor in any counterbalancing force, such as boys being sexually harassed by either parent or outside the family unit. Or creating a laser focus so quickly to there being a perpetrator and victim of sex assault at all!
Plenty of other strife, such as with the boys, is also more than enough to counteract the discrepancy in divorce here.
The reaction is about how this topic reflects a lot more about you, and the additional negative affects on society that are centered around pre-judicial judgement on males, and a society that ignores where males are victims.
In this thread, and this current point in time, I completely understand how this might seem like a completely left field reaction to you and many people. But it shouldn't be and I can do my part by pointing that out.
Regardless, it is shocking to me that people would gravitate toward "aha this must be what happened" out of the universe of possibilities in what could just as easily be a rounding error.
I can simultaneously acknowledge that maybe during the time of this study, that population did do exactly what you imagine. Its just has to factor in so much more for that to even be the first thing one thinks about.
https://www.economist.com/img/b/300/346/90/sites/default/fil...
If it was just dads refusing to understand girls etc you'd see at least some difference before then.
And since the reported incidence of sexual abuse by biological dads is larger than the total increase in divorces over the entire period I'd argue that is likely the main culprit, and that daughters aren't really a problem with non abusive dads.
the 0.36% difference was just in the netherlands and not the rest of the population polled?
> [I]n the five years when the first-born is between the ages of 13 and 18, that increase goes up to 5%. And it peaks, at 9%, when the child is 15. In America, for which the data the researchers collected were sparser than those in the Netherlands, the numbers are roughly double this.
A gap of 5-15% of all couples is I hope way too much to be explained by fathers who abuse their daughters.
Sounds kinda like sexism is the wedge driven between the father, and his wife and daughter. One effective way to reduce bigotry is through compassionate exposure: knowing, and sympathizing with a member of a population different from yourself.
> In light of all this, it is intriguing to note that Dr Kabatek and Dr Ribar found one type of couple who seem immune to the daughter effect: those in which the father grew up with a sister.
I have friction with my stepchild. He doesn't want me to be a part of his life. Sometimes, I wish that he was older and we could try MDMA therapy to build a compassionate bond... he's not even in elementary school yet; that's a great way to get your child taken away. But I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...
That's a bit of a stretch. N of 1 but I (male) can easily see myself being more open about my daughters' personal choices than my wife. (Yes I read the article and saw the point about strife between fathers and daughters. If I had to guess my sense is that a dad's intent is not to be sexist, but to keep their daughters safe. Whether that's an effective approach is another question.)
It can be both. Infantilizing, being overprotective, on the basis of gender is an expression of sexism. I'm sure that it's well intentioned, but if one only examines their intentions and not impact, then they're not actually reducing harm
(I can’t judge my own success in this regard, but it’s where I’m at right now).
Also, father needs to make sure he is protecting her from actual danger rather then imaginary. For example, if you are controlling your daughter "for her own good" against imaginary dangers and teaching her to accept control like that, you are priming her for controlling abusive relationship.
And the actual danger to her is exactly that - a guy who is controlling and later abusive. If she interprets early warning red flags as "caring" or "protection", she will get exactly that.
Women have something of a tendency to live longer than men. Men are more likely to take dangerous jobs, like fire fighter or infantry member. Men are more likely to go to jail. Women are more likely to attempt suicide and survive it. Men are more likely to succeed at killing themselves when they attempt suicide.
There are lots of shitty things that go on in the world and the world likes to sexually harass women, sexually assault women, treat them like whores who were "asking for it" when they end up raped, pregnant out of wedlock, etc. etc. But it's questionable logic to claim that the world is more dangerous for women.
Show that you take your responsibility as a step parent as a duty, even if he says he hates you (the best reaction to that is to unemotionally and calmly make it clear your parental role is unconditional, e.g. ‘ok, but i’m still your stepdad and i love you.’) Or: ‘ok, you feel how you feel but it’s still my job to help you brush your teeth.’
Give him low pressure opportunities to do things with you, don’t force anything that isn’t necessary.
Don’t expect too much right now, you are likely connected to some trauma in his life, and no four year old likes to be forced to do anything.
If he’s younger than four, it all applies doubly.
So actually what is happening is a struggle between parental advice, and outsider influence.
Now I find it interesting how you immediately make the jump and accuse the father (and it's also interesting that you single out the father) to be the bad guy. Dare I say outsiders don't give a shit about the daughter and their influence over her is very likely much more negative?
Considering he's not even in elementary school yet, I wouldn't worry too much about it right now. I'm not a parent, but it seems to me like 4-5 year olds or younger aren't the most rational or emotionally-developed people.
Just be a good person/parent and I imagine he'll warm up to you as he gets older.
Just be an adult, keep working at the relationship. Spend time being there, available for the play that children enjoy. Be open, let the child lead the stories and tell you things. If there is a preschool, visit and volunteer. It can be easier if the other parent is not there while you play.
> I wonder if one-sided interpersonal problems like this can be addressed by giving the adult MDMA and the child a placebo...
Had to laugh at this, you know what you are doing, it will work out.
And which side do you think those one-sided interpersonal problems are on?
FWIW if you were my step parent and you seriously considered this to be a potential solution I wouldn't want you to be part of my life either. Maybe approach this from the other viewpoint: your stepchild does not want you in their life because they want someone else in their life instead. It never was about you in the first place.
Mine! Did you even read what I said? Y'all having trouble with that "generous interpretation" here.
> It never was about you in the first place.
No, it's about his wellbeing. He would be happier if he was happy to have me around. He'd be better off not spiting himself simply for the purpose of defiance.
You say the problem is yours but then you right away foist it back on your step-child because he is the one that would be happier 'if he was happy to have you around'. But that is the root of the problem. Adults will be adults I guess. Best of luck there.
It kinda sounds like you're projecting your baggage on my situation, which you know nothing about. Before I arrived on the scene, my partner was at wits end, and didn't have the energy to be a good parent and also maintain a professional career. With me here, we can share parental and other household duties, pool financial resources, etc. The child has needs, but so do parents.
As for what makes young kids happy: it's nearly the opposite of what they actually need. He hates bedtime, he hates bathtime, he doesn't want to brush his teeth, he'd rather have dessert than vegetables, he'd rather watch TV than go to kindergarten, and it goes on and on. And that's about what he gets at the other household -- any rule is negotiable, and a tantrum always wins, because that parent is overworked and exhausted all the time. So naturally, he hates our household. Would he be happier if my partner was similarly exhausted? Maybe in the moment, but not in the long term.
He blames me for his parents' divorce, which happened over a year before I came around (but of course he can't remember that far back). And you know what? I was open to bailing on the scene, for his good, for the first year that I was around -- but the other parent isn't remotely interested in reconciliation. He thinks he'd be happy if I was gone and his bio-parents remarried, but he has trouble thinking 5 minutes in the future, let alone 15 years. If they were still together, he'd be stuck in the middle of their toxic relationship -- his life would be awful.
That is the key. And until he is able to realize that it isn't necessarily true this situation will persist. Keep in mind that his parents may have had a toxic relationship but that he doesn't really see it that way: to him this was the time when his parents were together and he could see both of them, to him you are an obstacle on the way to achieving a re-run of that situation. Little kids are pretty good at knowing what they want, extremely good at being angry at anything and everything and not so good at realizing any of this so you have your work cut out for you.
Some empathy, rather than drugging the child, might help. Try and understand where he is coming from and be honest with yourself about whether there are things that you are doing that could be contributing to a rift.
paywalled and on mobile
Joking aside, I’m the youngest in a family of 3 boys and 4 girls and your comment lines up with my upbringing. Being the youngest I got to see the teenager year insanity of my sisters all unfold. Another anecdote is that when one of my brothers did get in trouble it was always something significantly worse than my sisters.
Wow that sounds severe, what damage was done?
(edit: changed link, didn't realize how spammy statista.com is)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
A ratio of 3.4 in the US (77% male) as opposed to 1.7 globally (63% male).
This is a combination of male suicide attempts being underreported and gendered differences in suicide as a cry for help vs a desire to end it all. There's also a minor statistical effect where a single suicidal women will attempt suicide multiple times vs a single suicidal male attempting it once (so you get different numbers comparing suicide attempts by gender vs people who have attempted suicide by gender).
People who attempt suicide to seek attention are still suffering serious problems and it's not something to judge as "not a real problem".
Men and boys engage in risky activities which aren't classified as suicide attempts but may be exacerbated by wanting to die, such as violence, drug abuse, dangerous driving, even extreme sports.
Men sometimes commit suicide in very deliberate and carefully planned ways that ensure success. That's bound to be more successful than spontaneously running into the bathroom and swallowing every tablet in the medicine cupboard. Sometimes this is because they believe they've failed their social obligations and will never be respected. Eg. cheating on their wife, beating their wife, being unemployed, etc.
To be fair, I don’t recall ever being teased for crying.
Liberal democracy and the liberal social and economic orders have done so much good for western societies, but this is another great example of how something they have displaced -- coming of age rituals and expectations -- has really had a negative impact on the people living in them.
lots of studies about that. especially twin studies with m/f twins.
Twin studies with m/f twins outside of an environment shaped by external imposition of traditional (or otherwise differentiated) gender roles and gender-based expectations and treatments?
If so, how was that acheived?
If not, you haven't supported the conclusion of differences even if you fix environmental differences.
Another thing you can do is compare countries, or families, or perhaps schools, that are "more gender-role-restrictive" or "less gender-role-restrictive". Surely if the environment has an impact, then varying the strength of that environment would vary the impact. (Obviously there would be other variables to control for.)
The genders clearly are quite different (on average with large individual variations). It also must matter a lot how society is structured to handle the young maturing. I don't think 2021 America is particularly good at this.
I have two sons. One was a handful when he hit puberty and one was not. I sat both of them and a friend of theirs down one day to talk to the one who was a handful and talked to him about the impact of hormones on his mood. The punchline for that conversation was "Your problem is called testosterone, not My Bitch Mother."
All three boys laughed and all three boys were easier to cope with afterwards.
Except the joke wasn't a reply to you, but someone else, so you can be assured they were not hitting on you on that one.
Also, you don't even know 'irrational' and 'ineedasername' genders and sexual preferences, so you cant say 'he' was trying to hit on 'her'.
What I said was I fail to correctly interpret friendly banter that occurs between other people here because it isn't something I first-hand experience.
Being ugly to me and people downvoting me and all this crap for stating that doesn't change it. It's just more evidence that people are all too often not friendly to me as an individual, so I stand by all of my above observations.
1. People here are not actually friendly to me. They are sometimes faux friendly while treating me like nothing but a piece of ass, which I deem to be predatory behavior, the opposite of friendly.
2. That fact makes it hard for me to correctly interpret friendly banter between other people when it does occur.
3. I continue to wonder if posting here is a giant waste of my time given the amount of ridiculous crap I get for no real reason other than posting as openly female.
Seeing how (to me) you overreacted to both my and ' zadokshi' comment with a long reply about your stress and how much you suffer from these interactions, I guess I would suggest you either stop posting here - at least for a while - to relax, or create a username that doesn't indicate your gender or real identity in any way.
In a side note, if I was on this level of stress and disappointment (sorry, english as second language and the best word here escaped my mind) in other people and and interaction with them, I would try to see someone to talk too.
Edit: BTW, you literally said 'if a guy here is being friendly...'
Yes, I did and the very next set of words is the following qualifier:
you can pretty much bet dollars to donuts
It's not some kind of "all men" statement, but that's likely how a lot of people are interpreting it. It's a "I have to invest so much ridiculous energy in trying to not accidentally signal that I'm here hoping some random internet stranger will pick me up that it makes it hard as all hell to try to behave normally and talk normally and interpret things normally."
Anyway, I said I was leaving. This is my last clarification. All other "Wow, I can't believe people are so wildly misinterpreting my words" reactions will be kept to myself.
Have a nice Saturday. (Or whatever day of the week it is where you live.)
Then you accuse friendly people of not being friendly and treating you like apiece of ass, admit you cannot recognize friendly banter, and accuse people of sexism.
If someone here is unfriendly to others, it's you.
BTW, I'm a guy, and I'm trying to be friendly, and I can assure you I'm not looking for a date.
But that's not workable for a long list of reasons that I'm both tired of trying to explain and tired of being told are not legitimate concerns or whatever. It boils down to this: men are not expected to hide their gender to participate online. Telling a woman to hide hers as a "solution" is dismissing her very real problems and compounding them.
It shouldn't be an offense worthy of being downvoted to hell to say "Yeah, I missed the joke for the following two reasons, one of which is no joking around allowed when talking to Doreen! Can't have that!
It's exhausting to have to err on the side of being excessively serious every minute I'm here because if I make the mistake of being my normal, friendly self, everyone wants my phone number so to speak.
Making that observation isn't me being a bitch, but getting downvoted to hell for it sure makes me sympathetic to the hords of women who openly hate on men and blame the conspiracy theory of The Patriarchy for all their ills.
Anyway, I need to go do other things. This is not a conversation I really want to have. At all.
Edited: Because auto-corrupt is the bane of my existence.
A quick parting thought: one feature of HN (with which I strongly disagree) is that downvotes require no accompanying explanation or justification.
I've sometimes been pretty vexed when my perfectly good comments got downvoted.
I'd encourage you to not read too much into a downvote. It can be impossible to divine what actually motivates each occurrence.
Pointing out a comment where this has happened would go a long way to bolster the claim.
I understand what you're saying here, and I also understand that it can be very frustrating to have to be "on guard" all the time because there are bad actors out there. However, I think generalizing that all men that are friendly are after sex is insulting. There are plenty of men that don't pay any attention to what sex the people they interact with online are, and plenty more that just aren't looking for that type of thing during those interactions. I expect it's probably most of them, with the caveats that 1) I have no basis to back up that guess, and 2) the bad actors certainly stand out a lot more, so likely weigh the "feel" of how many bad actors there are to one side.
It's always strange to see this kind of thing said. It's uniquely western that this behaviour would be tolerated.
In my neck of the woods, such disrespect would result in a hiding, such that by the time a child is 3 they know not to disrespect their parents... at least not to the extent of verbal insults like that.
What would anyone other than Ted Cruz allow someone else to disrespect their spouse like that?
I'm the one in the family with a potty mouth who swears like a sailor. It was funny to them and they all three laughed in part because that line was colorfully descriptive of his cranky, blamey behavior, not because anyone in the family ever spoke to me that way.
I was hit as a kid. I have no distinct memory of being hit really, but I have distinct memories of being scared of it if I misbehaved and parents getting angry.
As a parent now, I see two reasons a parent might hit their kid, and neither is acceptable to me.
(A) you lose your temper because the child misbehaves. This isn’t acceptable because you’re reacting emotionally. The outcome could be extreme, either mentally or physically.
(B) you don’t lose your temper and make a reasoned decision to hit the child. This is even worse because you’ve justified hurting a child, to yourself.
Its not news that how a child is raised will impact their outlook on life. I wasn’t hit a lot, and I’m generally able to not make a physical reaction (such as hitting) when I am upset with my son.
I’ve seen first hand that others who had more violence in their childhood (eg hit with a wire coat hanger by a parent) will themselves be much more likely to react with physical violence if they get upset.
There are times when a parent needs to do something that will make it very clear that the child's behavior is completely inappropriate. Things for which, if they do not teach the child this, it will cause problems later. For some people, that act may be a spanking or similar. For others, it might be making the child eat soap.
Personally, I'm a bellower. I almost never raise my voice. But when I do, I am heard... period; everyone in the house stops in their tracks to find out what has pushed me over the edge. I don't like yelling, but if my child is doing something that could cause them physical injury (or similar) and I cannot seem to get them to stop by telling them to... I raise my voice, a lot.
But the comment I replied to gives the impression of a pretty harsh implementation:
> such disrespect would result in a hiding, such that by the time a child is 3 they know not to disrespect their parents...
That's a pretty rare event.
If I misbehaved at school, I'd get a caning (bamboo) or hiding (short length of hose pipe).
I was never abused. Boundaries were always known, and the punishment for crossing them also known. If you got in trouble.
I mean... you do something cheeky, and the punishment is a bit of pain for 10 seconds. That was always much much better than being told how badly you'd disappointed your parents or teacher.
I'd take a hiding over a telling off any day.
FYI, my partner was also beaten as a child, but she'd vehemently against corporal punishment now. Our children are being raised without the cane.
Not sure if wife or son is also dangerous.
The last time I was in the ER was due to falling off a skateboard and needing stitches in my chin. I was trying to learn to skate, at 45. My son got me a skateboard for Father’s Day. I always wished I’d learned to skate as a kid.
Pry 50% of my ER calls are due to bike wrecks. My wife always says the day I buy a motorcycle is the day she buys a black dress and veil :D
I've overheard parents talk about how easy daughters are. Always made me laugh a little.
http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/uproar/
How did you get to a place for this comment from the parent article and the conversations here?
This seems like a deranged place to go...
Probably more harmful than useful in dealing with what is ultimately the realization that free agents have different objectives and that immature agents are poor determiners of their ultimate objectives.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
That one's for chrome but I'm sure you can find similar for other browsers too.
From my own experience. When my daughter hit 12 it was a fucking nightmare. The hormones hit girls hard and they can become incredibly difficult. That said, now she’s 13 things are much easier and look to be getting easier by the week. Although my wife and I both have to be very understanding and on the same team to deal with difficult behaviour — we have a lot of strategy meetings.
Lacking empathy, and wanting independence without responsibility are part of being a teenager. But 12-year old girls can sometimes be super charged griefers.
On the flip side, teenagers are actually awesome to hang out with and total joys full of creativity and fun — if you work through the refusal to clean their room, general lack of hygiene and the drama.
Good luck :) From my understanding the worst age is actually closer to 14/15, and only by 17 or so do things get better.
I absolutely agree.
Well, is it their room or not? If it’s their room, viz. their inviolable space, what basis[1] do you have to enforce your standards on others’ spaces? Unless it’s an actual hygiene/H&S/hoarding situation, or part of the de-jure shared living space (like a Jack+Jill bathroom) then a messy room isn’t a real problem, and raising a fuss about it is only going to create conflict.
[1]: “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument: your kids have no choice w.r.t. where they live.
EDIT: as you can tell, I’m not a parent - and am still too mentally close to adolescence :)
Frankly this entire argument feels like an intentional twisting of the common expression "their room."
I’m fine with having family “team cleans”: it’s a positive shared experience, and I can’t protest instilling discipline for tidiness either - I just draw the line at “tidy your room” as overstepping a crucial boundary that arbitrarily encroaches on our autonomy.
By analogy, it’s like if my parents forced me to use a particular desktop wallpaper image on my computer, or restricting what I wore on weekends without a better reasoned argument than “because I said so”.
Teenagers don't have full autonomy, that's why they aren't adults. Parents exist to set boundaries and expectations for teenager's future adulthood (or more specifically their viewpoint on what a normal adult is).
Many teenagers enter adulthood and realize their parent's expectations weren't who they wish to be. But generally their parent's version is a good enough starting point to discover who they wish to become as an adult.
If new adults decide they want to live in a mess, at that time they can choose to do so because they hopefully understand the social, functional, and health consequences of that choice. An understanding a teenager may lack.
If they have the skills and just choose to be a slob, that's on them. But many young adults seem genuinely lost.
Well, I guess if your desktop wallpaper was porn or nazi paraphernalia your parents would be totally right to teach you that it should be something else.
Frankly your posts read like someone who doesn't understand that as an adult, it's your responsibility to have more wisdom and experience than your kids, and to help them benefit from it.
This is true, but it's also your responsibility to help them gain wisdom and experience. Making decisions for them may leverage your wisdom and experience wonderfully, but sometimes it's important to let them make mistakes and learn from them.
Using the "clean your room" example though, that's more of a skill and habit because it's not the kind of thing that's gonna feel like "a mistake to learn from" - perhaps until much much later. That's actually how it worked out with me, my mom is a messy hoarder and I grew up like that, but by the time I moved in with my now-wife I just brought my plant, computer and a small amount of clothes :)
But my life would have been better if I was always neat and organized rather than figuring it out in my late 20s.
There's also something to be said for learning from the mistakes of others. I saw what smoking did to my grandfather. It destroyed his lungs and he slowly lost the ability to breathe. It robbed him of his strength, then his mobility, then his life. It made a stronger impression on me than a good role model ever could.
Perhaps you particularly appreciate the value of a good habit specifically because you saw the consequences of the opposite.
It is not their room.
> “my house, my rules” is not a convincing argument
It is in my house ;)
>> It is in my house ;)
Just wanted to tell you - I laughed out loud. Dad power! (Or mom-power, whatever)
Obviously this is completely different when the child is a fully-grown adult--at that point, what they need is not a life lesson--but for a minor just beginning to learn how to be an adult, the parents must impose their will on their child to some extent for the child's own good.
As a parent, your job is to help your children become the best people they can be, not the people they'd turn out by default.
I would much rather my son hate me now and thank me later than the other way around.
To use this example - if your choice is to raise a child who is organized vs one who is a slob: aim for organized because it will help them down the road in many ways. It's not the most important thing, but leaving the kid to their own devices is just lazy.
Funny example - every woman I ever dated has a story of coming to a guy's apartment, seeing that it's gross, and turning around. So these men are literally missing out on sex/partnership opportunities because their parents didn't teach them to clean up their room. Thanks a lot mom and dad.
Well put.
FWIW my parents were 100% diligent about bedtime, nutrition, cleaning my room, etc. I threw it all to the wind as soon as I moved out for college. Predictably I felt like shit. But I had to go through those experiences of feeling like shit, and then noticing that the "responsible" behaviors helped, before I cared enough to prioritize them.
In other words, I see what my parents were trying to do. I see what so many parents are trying to do when they get into huge conflicts with their kids. Teach lessons that they learned firsthand, so that the kids can skip the unpleasant parts (being sleep deprived, living in filth, bad breakups, whatever) and just do everything right the first time. But it doesn't work that way. Everyone has to find out for themselves.
This is the point I was trying to make in my downvoted post - thank you for stating it more clearly than I was able to.
Teenager in a house has to live within the rules. Homeowner within a HOA has to live within the rules. Homeowner within city limits has to live within the rules, etc.
Just a general remark: If you're not a parent [1], don't tell others how to be parents. It's okay to ask questions (e.g., "why are you doing it like this instead of like that?"), but don't believe you know what you're talking about.
[1] "Parent" as in "functionally a parent", not necessarily "biologically a parent". If you're raising a child, you're a parent, even if they aren't your biological child.
FWIW I think GP raises an interesting question.
2. It's hard to know how to properly instill good habits in a teenager. Even being a parent of a teen doesn't always mean you know how to do that, and being a parent of a non-teen is definitely not enough. So don't try to categorize parents in general as having this knowledge.
We need to remember we were like them once. They’re little extensions of us.
Whenever I have troubles with my kids I try to remember that I was a kid not that long ago. If I zoom out a little, it was just a blink. I’ll spend more of my life with my kids being adults, fate permitting, and the struggles of them figuring things out (and me as well) will be another blink. I really want to make the most of it.
To be honest I'm just barely hanging in trying to pretend I'm different now at 33.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I was taught my entire life that I’d grow into something and certain things would happen that would make me an adult, and i suppose I inferred this would be transformative. Not really though. If I drop that inferred notion I almost find it freeing. I’m not a kid or an adult or anything besides “me”, whatever that needs to mean in the moment.
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/23/the-inventi...
Often by age 12 girls would be fully contributing household member doing all work done by adult women and by age 14-15 so would be boys doing everything an adult men would be doing.
Even now that's the case in many places in developing countries, teenagers act like complete adults in mannerism, thoughtfulness and responsibilities. Teenager is a phase that is a luxury, where despite being capable you use more than you bring/produce. In west, it gets you to be an adult without any consequences.
btw once your baby is born you might not feel the same way. reality kicks in. and it kicks in even harder at puberty.
Some rough housing helps a lot when they're younger too. 10 minutes of wrestling will buy you an hour of helping clean up or playing nicely with others.
Can anyone with grown daughters and a sister speculate as to why this may be the case?
It isn't entirely clear from the brief mention in the article whether having had a sister changes how a man interacts with his wife or how he interacts with his daughter.
Girls go through very negative emotions between ages 12 and 18. These can be very challenging for a family. PM me for details!
This 5-year-longitudinal study from the Netherlands backs up my anecdotal assertion, adolescents are difficult, girls are slightly worse, and it starts really horribly at 12/13 then eases off as they approach adulthood: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12...
Here’s an article with advice on how to cope from the NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/copi...
They were (and kinda still are actually even though I’m nearly 30) hostile to boys though. Because of getting pregnant or falling madlessly in love with an idiot. Which always sounded ridiculous to me since I’ve disliked children from a very young age and was academically ambitious. And actually not very much versed in romantic activities either.
Male fetuses are more likely to die in the womb if the mother is stressed. Marriages are more likely to end if the marriage is stressful. Therefore, marriages with first born daughters are more likely to end with divorce, by no fault of the daughter.
Disclosure: I was once a first-born teenage daughter. Yes, my parents divorced.
> But, unlike previous work, their study also looked at the effect of the girl’s age. It found that “daughter-divorce” risk emerges only in a first-born girl’s teenage years (see chart). Before they reach the age of 12, daughters are no more linked to couples splitting up than sons are.
I don't. I was specifically responding to yellowbeard's comment, which read:
> Childless parents as a result of self aborting male fetuses would not show up in the study.
Yellowbeard provided one explanation for the fact that, despite male fetuses being more likely to self-abort, there is no difference between divorce stats of young male and female children. My response said why that explanation was wrong. I wasn't saying that the self-abortion delta affects divorce ratios, only that it might.
(Indeed, I do expect that it does have an effect, but that that effect is miniscule and unlikely to be measurable.)
A disproportionate amount of parents with first born daughters over sons is inconsequential because they are measuring the percentage of divorces for each population, not the total number of divorces for each population.
The logic she uses here is really far fetched and unlikely to be true so you really need statistical causal links in order to say anything substantial. I mean her disclosure also discloses a possible bias. She may not have the ability to admit that she her self was the causal factor in her own parents divorce.
If parents have already seen a boy go through their teenage years, they’ll be better prepared for the grief a 12-year-old girl can cause.
Also, anecdotally, a close friend of mine had a very difficult older sister. The younger siblings witnessed her bad behaviour, and decided not to repeat the theatrics.
Moreover, secondary school students live in a supposed democracy yet few actually have the right to vote on policies that affect them (not to mention taxes such as sales/use tax which are "taxation without representation.") Student "governments" typically have little to no actual power over school policies or the curriculum.
On the other hand, I have heard media pundits suggest that the current wave of youth crime is due in part to schools being closed. I'm not sure whether that supports or refutes the first paragraph.
p.s. Instead of downvotes on my speculation I'd prefer logical arguments and/or evidence one way or another. Then again this seems kind of off-topic for HN so it may not work well with the HN format anyway.