The sort of people you describe have no effect on the number of divorces, because they're not getting married in the first place.

Don't lecture us on the contentment of marriage without acknowledging what the other side of the coin is. This was the reality of marriage before divorce was normalized.

I would agree having dozens of short relationships and not being able to commit to something, even just a core set of friends, probably isn't great. So person I replied to is perhaps right there.

But idealizing a young marriage I think is stupid and should be criticized and is directly related to 1950's housewives not being able to leave their relationships.

I was born in the 80's and I grew up with nothing but cynicism and pessimism about relationships and marriage; even then it was something like "40% of marriages end in divorce", or that most relationships don't last and that the few that do and get glorified / romanticised is survivorship bias. It made me think "What is the point?". Add that with a load of repeated messages that men are shallow and horny pigs that objectify and abuse women, it really wasn't encouraging.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces

That sounds a bit like, "what's the point in life if we all die?"

You can still enjoy a relationship, even though it might not be for forever - because nothing really is.

It is most likely when you think of 100 individuals and see that statistic that 40 of those individuals are getting divorced.

Instead it could be something like 5 of those people were responsible for half the divorces.

formerly? Just look at the majority of comments for this article.

https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success

As soon as you remove our self-imposed social rules, we revert to our natural instincts, where a few males copulate, but rarely bond, with the majority of females. This leads to unhappy bonds where some of the less desirable males take care of females and offspring that is not theirs, while the rest of the males just get angry at the world and start fighting. A great way to build an army (e.g. Daesh) is to promise angry young involuntarily celibate males a bunch of virgins. You can also use their dissatisfaction to make a bunch of money, with the promise that they are becoming more desirable as they consoom more product (see Andrew Tate).

> We predict that imposing monogamous marriage reduces male reproductive competition and suppresses intra-sexual competition, which shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men. These effects result in (i) lower rates of crime, personal abuse, intra-household conflict and fertility, and (ii) greater parental investment (especially male), economic productivity (gross domestic product (GDP) per capita) and female equality.

https://theconversation.com/society-wide-benefits-of-monogam...

Maybe so, but if we can agree on that, we need to work on making divorce less of a life-destroying event (in particular for the man).

Prenups are legal in all 50 states; use them and normalize them. As for child custody, men have even odds of being granted custody when they bother to contest it. However, they bother to contest it a depressingly low percentage of the time.