It’s called serial monogamy and a real thing.
Comment on Duh
Earflap@reddthat.com 1 week agoYou 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.
uis@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Earflap@reddthat.com 1 week ago
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.
qarbone@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Have you included the years of exclusive dating prior to marriage? Or contrasted that with people that date for years without labeling it or getting married?
Earflap@reddthat.com 1 week ago
My dude this is a shitposting community I didn’t put any thought at all into my comment. I’m just musing on some general ideas I think about. This isn’t like, a well researched position or anything. But I’d guess the timer starts when you become exclusive and resets in major life events. If you just date then you get ten years before you want something else. If you get married before that, then that is the big exciting change and resets the clock. Then kids come along and resets it again but then you’re all out of resets.
Bickering like an old married couple isn’t just a meme.
Zementid@feddit.nl 1 week ago
It’s the kids. 11+ yrs still kicking it as dinks. Best thing ever!
Earflap@reddthat.com 1 week ago
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.
Zementid@feddit.nl 1 week ago
Lol, you rationalize a lot instead of feeling it, right? Universe ends in heat death, Food supply will chease 2042, climate wars will ravage earth, populism reigns… and you really think there is still a meaning to all this except: “Have the most fun before you die but don’t be an asshole.” (or whatever you want)
Bringing children to this world to feel a purpose for someone’s own life is kind of sad and super unfair towards the children. (Go child! Distract me from my own mortality!)
Live life how you want to, mine is brilliant I hope ours will be too.
indomara@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
Earflap@reddthat.com 1 week ago
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.
psychologytoday.com/…/why-so-many-marriages-end-a…
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
meowMix2525@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I think you’re confusing human/evolutionary nature with what 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 and that 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 concur.