We all tend to equilibrium. Having someone vs being single is generally an improvement to most people, but it will feel like an average day eventually.
These comments are fun
Love is decision, not a feeling.
The way I have had it explained is:
Infatuation is psychosis
Love is reason
Which makes a lot of sense to me.
Not to downplay the value of infatuation, I’d say! Free drugs’re always nice, and infatuation is an especially exquisite drug in and of itself! Its relative rarity also adds to its refinement!
All that’s needed is an understanding that it is just that, a drug, and like with every other drug, the high inevitably fades.
I also think people tend to forget that infatuation can be reignited! It’s not necessarily an easy process, nor is it an unpleasant one! Taking a nice trip somewhere romantic (thoroughly recommend a beach resort during late autumn if you’re partial to cold, the sparsity of people and melancholy of the time and place have done wonders so far!), a cozy date, a tantalising movie - basically any shared experience can lead to it, as long as it’s the right one for everyone involved!
Love and infatuation can feed into each other with a little bit of patience and curiosity!
The way I see it, love can blossom from infatuation, but a relationship can’t survive on infatuation alone.
Looks like someone hasn’t heard the Darkness classic Love Is Only a Feeling!
Real talk: I’ve had this happen a couple of times, and know of many other people who either went through this or believed the same nonsense, with all types and permutations of identities and Southern plumbing between them. And all I’m left with after trying to wrap my head around this thing is a question: can we really blame the people who are doing stuff like this considering Mass Media’s been force-feeding us this nonsense from the beginning?
I’m not saying this should imply forgiving the behaviour, not in a million years! I’m just questioning where our collective frustration should be directed.
Only valuing a relationship for the momentary bliss of being close to someone new is a problem of emotional immaturity.
The problem arises when we consider the facts that a person’s emotional development depends on parenting, and people tend to partner with others of similar emotional maturity. If you’ve got one immature parent, you’ve more than likely got two. It takes extra work to shed that baggage and start being your genuine self.
It’s definitely a cultural ill, but I can’t credit the notion that our emotional development comes from our media. We need to be teaching people what emotional maturity is, how to get there, and how to heal from having emotionally immature parents.
Emotional immaturity is so pervasive at this point you’d need to put this stuff in the curriculum of every school and have that initiative succeed for multiple decades to change the culture.
My belief is that emotional immaturity is the natural state of humanity. Without guidance, some wise people will reach maturity, but that’s really a small subset of the population, and the vast majority of people will not make this growth.
The vast majority of people do things because that’s what they’ve always known; it takes special effort to question why you do what you do. Saying that these people are emotionally immature may be true, but I don’t think that the cause is that people have emotionally immature parents. People have to be specifically taught to value rationality and wisdom over vibes and feelings, and without this concerted effort, most people will simply be emotionally immature.
I don’t think humanity has a “natural state” so much as a rock bottom - and I’m not even convinced it has one of those. It’s not really a state of being we should promote or excuse.
You speak of guidance as if it comes from some unknown external source - the source is other people. That’s exactly why I said we should teach about emotional maturity in schools, to give kids necessary guidance.
That’s a big subject, so I’m just going to recommend my favourite book about it:
Seems a lot of people get addicted to the drama, continuous stimulation, emotional rollercoasters, cheap thrills and quick validation. Social media made it a lot worse. It gets to the point people can’t live anymore without the drama and go in withdrawal to seek out new thrills. It’s the opposite of a stable relationship.
I get what you mean, stress for the cortisol, anxiety for the adrenaline type deal. And, yeah, I do agree that such a temperament/character/neurochemical inclination seeks these situations for different reasons.
But I’ve also seen plenty of cases where it was just based on a belief, they were convinced that a relationship reached a breaking point once the chemical ecstasy started to die down. The people holding it were obviously suffering because of it (though not fully aware of this causation) and genuinely wanted to find a fix. Unfortunately, they went from disappointment to disappointment when the inevitable kept happening.
It’s also why I only have questions, there are layers upon layers of nuance with subjects like this…
I don’t think its too much of an ask for my partner to be aware of and avoid brainrot.
If an idiot like me can, they can too.
Again, it is well within your prerogative to not accept such behaviour! I honestly view it as yet another traumatic maladaptation and treat it as such - even though it’s causally not their fault that they believe/behave thusly, it is their responsibility to keep it in check.
But I’ll be straight with you, I think you may be underestimating yourself and overestimating the average person. Critical Thinking really isn’t innate, it’s a skill. A skill which a lot (I’d even go as far as to say a large majority) of people thoroughly lack, because it is a skill which needs training from very early on, as it builds upon itself. I don’t think there’s a general educational schema on Earth at the moment which in any way truly encourages Critical Thinking, if there ever has been one. From what I’ve seen, it tends to come into play way later and in very specific fields of study, which means there’s a lot of catching up to do by that point, so the horizon it affects tends to remain narrow.
Not to mention the utterly insidious and imperceptible nature of ideological corruption. It’s incredibly hard to see the brainwashing if one’s been going through it since before one started forming coherent throughts. It permeates even the subconscious.
I’m not trying to play the perfect being over here, I’ve seen myself being as dumb as a rock at times and I know that I have a llllot of learning left in front of me. But realistically speaking, just because we’re dumb doesn’t mean others aren’t even dumber…
Genitalia. Meaning the genders and sexualitiesb of the people are not what determines their behaviour
Ah, thank you. Of course. I was confused by “between them”, thinking it only referred to the southern plumbing.
Love is not a thing that happens to you, love is an action. Love is a conscious decision, made every day. Love is work.
I once read some research done on marriages and love and what predictors there are for a marriage failing.
You know the older I get the more convinced I become that humans are really only supposed to mate for like 10 years or so. Just long enough for your kids to be able to fend for themselves before you move on and start a new family.
The average duration for marriage is 7 years before divorce, teens desperately want independence and are sexually mature; I mean evolutionarily it doesn’t really make sense for a marriage to last forever.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that the society that we built doesn’t really conform to how people actually behave and desire. Probably yet another thing Abrahamic religion ruined for us.
Serial monogamy (as I understand it) is jumping from short term relationship to short term relationship because of an inability to feel secure with your partner.
I’m talking about forming a meaningful bond with someone for a decade (or a bit longer) and when that relationship gets stale you move on.
Some animals are truly monogamous for life. It is effortless for them to stay together because that is how their brains are wired.
Humans are not like this or divorce and cheating would be practically unheard of. I just think that if we were really monogamous creatures it would be a lot easier to stay in a long term relationship. Instead, half of marriages fall apart after about a decade.
What an odd take.
10 years for the children to be able to fend for themselves? Assuming you are married before the first pregnancy, then have a full term birth at 40 weeks, then wait 12 months before the second birth that would put the first child around … 8 when this hypothetical “ideal” marriage dissolved, and subsequent children even younger.
Which wouldn’t make sense at all from an evolutionary standpoint, finding another man to step in as a father is not easy, so much so that there were laws around the care of widows in most societies.
The average marriage duration is only 7 years? Seems its nearly double that here in Australia. I also have two 18 year olds living at home who say they desperately want independence but also don’t want to get a job or do dishes, and have the sexual maturity of a potato.
I don’t think we are “meant to” have any particular relationship type or length, humans are far too diverse for that.
Edit: Some interesting replies, notably both touch on the concept of “it takes a village” which I agree is something we have sadly lost in most of Western society. I however do not think it is a stand in for long term family units. Instead I think a “village” type of setup takes the pressure off parents and allows for a stronger partnership. The countries with longest marriages are all either countries with multi-generational housing as the norm, or with higher incomes per capita.
I think you’re confusing human/evolutionary nature with things that are a product of our, very recent, hyper-individualist societies. You ever heard the phrase, “it takes a village”? Early humans, heck even 50 years ago humans, lived much more communally than we do today. Especially if you read about native american societies.
It’s reasonable that a child could rely less on the parents in their home being in any specific arrangement if there is a robust and wholesome community/found family for them to fall back on, which teaches them how to be a productive member and compels them to do so. Look at boys and girls clubs of america, as just one very modern example.
I don’t think we are “meant to” have any particular relationship type or length, humans are far too diverse for that.
I concur.
10 years is plenty of time when you’re living in a tribe/extended family, which is how we lived for hundreds of thousands of years before today. Forcing kids to stay home until 18 is really counter to how we have been living since the very beginning.
This idea of isolated individual isolated family units with parents who are married forever just isn’t how humans are wired. Not every society lives this way. Indians generally live with their entire extended family and I think are better off for it. Communal living is a bug part of this.
Yeah, most marriages die around the 7 year mark.
I’m no researcher, but I know plenty of couples who have been married for 30+ years and not a single one of them is happy in their relationship. They’re just going through the motions and the spark of romance died decades ago.
If humans were truly wired for lifelong partnerships, then divorce would be an extremely rare thing. Instead half of marriages fail (around the 7 year mark) and the rest pretend everything is a-ok when it probably isn’t. Flip a coin when you get married. If its heads you stay married till you die, tails you’re divorced in under a decade.
Which wouldn’t make sense at all from an evolutionary standpoint, finding another man to step in as a father is not easy
The “point” of evolution (if a thoughtless natural process could be said to have a point) is to produce as many children as you can so hopefully some of them live to reproduce and keep the cycle going. Not to build a long term family. Find someone, get a baby out of them, raise it until it can feed itself and find someone new and spread the genes around for genetic diversity.
And who said anything about finding another man to step in? They live in the village with everyone else and everyone supervises them. Have you ever gone on a family vacation or something where a few different families all lived in the same space for a while? Everything is WAAAAAY easier when you have 10-20 people working on daily tasks and chores and planning, etc. People fall into whatever role they are helpful in and the kids go off and play on their own.
I also have two 18 year olds living at home who say they desperately want independence but also don’t want to get a job or do dishes
Your two 18 year olds have spent their entire lives in a society that has told them they can’t be independent until now. You’ve been suppressing their desires to leave for… what, 5 years? And you’re surprised they don’t want to do something as mundane and boring as the dishes? Please lol. Jobs are a fucking scam too.
and have the sexual maturity of a potato.
I’m going to assume you have sons. Hate to break it to you but your sons spend most of their day sexually frustrated and are probably nearly constantly jerking off. I bet you’ve washed like… gallons of their cum down the washing machine. Girls are just as horny too but it isn’t acceptable for them to show that. You can pretend that this is a normal thing but your kids “should have” been making babies for a long time now.
I don’t think we are “meant to” have any particular relationship type or length, humans are far too diverse for that.
I’m speaking in a passive sense. There is no god or point to anything but we’ve been molded by evolution for millions of years a certain way and the way we are living now is not compatible with how our brains are actually wired to live.
Remember, “old age” used to be like 30 until basically yesterday on evolutionary timescales. You had your kid at 15, you were a grandparent at 30, and you died shortly after. That was life, for nearly all of our history.
The dink lifestyle is indeed pretty great but has its own problems. At least with kids when you ask “what is the point of it all” you can look at your kids and think your life has meaning. Dink’s don’t get that though, and after a while routine sets in and things get boring and couples start looking elsewhere for meaning and purpose.
11 years isn’t really that long, though is longer than average. There are exceptions to every rule and if you’re someone who enjoys lifelong monogomy and your partner is on board then I hope you have a happy life together! But speaking in broad generalizations for humans as a whole, I think 10ish years is where we normally start looking for someone new, but we’ve been pigeonholed into this idea that you’re a failure if your marriage dissolves for any reason, and a LOT of people are GREATLY unhappy for it. That’s my ultimate point I guess.
