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.

It is a healthy end. If it's a bad marriage.

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.

Exactly. Divorce can be a healthy end to an unhealthy relationship. Can be. But if you're divorcing, you're already at an unhealthy state.

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).

It strikes me that GP is observing that legal divorce is happier than abuse, detachment, resentment, cold war, etc.

I think they have a point.

Better than abuse and resentment, yes; healthy, no.

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?

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.

And yes, it is. This argument is silly, because there's _clear_ subtext that it's a healthy end to an unhealthy relationship.

It's of course not healthy to end a healthy relationship. But hey, water is wet.

If the lung is cancerous and treatment resistant, then that might be a reasonable option.

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.

> But parents aren't just two people.

Yes, they still are. And parents that stay together in an unhealthy relationship can do more harm to their children than separating.

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."

https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/180281

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."

We're always talking about averages.

[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.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6462058/

What are some characteristics of a healthy end to a marriage?

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.

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.

Yes, the value of pre-marital counseling is vastly underappreciated IMO.

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.

And regular counsel during marriage. Your car shouldn't get a checkup more often than your marriage.

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.

As nwienert said better elsewhere in the thread: “You’re emotionally tying yourself to Christian theology and claiming it as universal.”

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 was certainly founded on religious principles, which is why homosexuals couldn't marry until recently

Simple counterexample: the USSR's views on gay marriage.

Out of curiosity: what were the USSR's views on gay marriage?

Or perhaps, marriage would be harder? If divorce is easy, what's the point of marriage?

Many administrivia reasons.

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...

> What vows?

In many cultures people make wedding vows about staying married until one of you dies.

I don't think being religious is so relevant. Plenty of atheists view marriage as a life-long commitment.

And plenty do not, what's your point?

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.

Why would this be any business of the state? Why is it any business of yours how someone else defines the commitment of their long term relationship?

It's not my responsibility to advertise my belief system to you.

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.

That the

> Nobody in my family is religious

point is out of place (because whether the family is religious seems to have little relevance)

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.

This is amazing. The proposal (pun intended) is literally for 5 years, 10 years or life.

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...

Married people can have separate bank accounts.

Whoosh.

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

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.

If you're curious what those "fixes" are for the latter, see https://www.gottman.com/product/the-seven-principles-for-mak....

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".

> If it's like a critical body part, someone is way too dependent

This is unhelpfully extending the metaphor into a straw man. It's simple enough to see the point.

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.

Yes, it's a two-way street. That is why both partners say the vows.

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.

> it’s a sunk cost fallacy to think you should always repair your marriage

I guess if you discount the "for better and for worse" part of the vows you take to one another....

> Why not?

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'.

> Because marriage is intended as an act of lifetime committent

For most of history marriage was property transfer, let's not pretend it's something more romantic than it is.

> 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 the fairy tale definition. For many, it's just a legal term.

Referring to a "lifetime committ[m]ent to what is seen as a positive relationship" as a fairy tale is pretty ridiculous.

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.

> The oaths made in a typical marriage are impossible

> Life-long good marriages exists

I'm sure you have this reconciled somehow, but it sounds contradictory to me.

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.

hence the second statment:

"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'. "

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.

sigh.

>> Sometimes things just don’t work out

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 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.

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%.

Not being snarky at all but isn't the answer to this always going to reduce to "have as many offspring with as many partners as possible"?

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).

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.

(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...

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 life gets easier and easier (e.g. government guarantees housing, income, education, etc.) then I can see that becoming nearer the truth.

A good starting point for this idea is "r/K selection theory": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

"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...

> 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.

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.

And your suggestion that “divorce isn’t bad because I can think of worse things” is logically flawed.

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.

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?

> Staying together in a dysfunctional marriage

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

People who cant afford to divorce.

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.

People evolve and so too should marriages.

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.

Probably not as many as you might imagine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884326

>Sorry. You need to have both Javascript and Flash enabled to view this content.

Lol.

Why not? If you don't get along the its better to end it than force it. That was the parents meaning. Do you have a counterargument?

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.

> ...more reason to fight with each other

Is this often the outcome of divorce? I imagine that spending more time apart should reduce the total volume of conflict

Note the ‘if you have kids’ beginning to the reasoning