Here’s a place where I feel like my models of romantic relationships are missing something, and I’d be interested to hear peoples’ takes on what it might be.
Background claim: a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so. Evidence: Aella’s data here and here are the most legible sources I have on hand; they tell a pretty clear story where sexual satisfaction is basically binary, and a bit more than half of men are unsatisfied in relationships of 10 years (and it keeps getting worse from there). This also fits with my general models of mating markets: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
What doesn’t make sense under my current models is why so many of these relationships persist. Why don’t the men in question just leave? Obviously they might not have better relationship prospects, but they could just not have any relationship. The central question which my models don’t have a compelling answer to is: what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?
Some obvious candidate answers:
Kids. This one makes sense for those raising kids, but what about everyone else? Especially as fertility goes down.
The wide tail. There’s plenty of cases which make sense which are individually unusual—e.g. my own parents are business partners. Maybe in aggregate all these unusual cases account for the bulk.
Loneliness. Maybe most of these guys have no one else close in their life. In this case, they’d plausibly be better off if they took the effort they invested in their romantic life and redirected to friendships (probably mostly with other guys), but there’s a lot of activation energy blocking that change.
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Wanting a dependent. Lots of men are pretty insecure, and having a dependent to provide for makes them feel better about themselves. This also flips the previous objection: high maintenance can be a plus if it makes a guy feel wanted/useful/valuable.
Social pressure/commitment/etc making the man stick around even though the relationship is not net positive for him.
The couple are de-facto close mostly-platonic friends, and the man wants to keep that friendship.
I’m interested in both actual data and anecdata. What am I missing here? What available evidence points strongly to some of these over others?
Edit-to-add: apparently lots of people are disagreeing with this, but I don’t know what specifically you all are disagreeing with, it would be much more helpful to at least highlight some specific sentence or leave a comment or something.
Ah, I think this just reads like you don’t think of romantic relationships as having any value proposition beyond the sexual, other than those you listed (which are Things but not The Thing, where The Thing is some weird discursive milieu). Also the tone you used for describing the other Things is as though they are traps that convince one, incorrectly, to ‘settle’, rather than things that could actually plausibly outweigh sexual satisfaction.
Different people place different weight on sexual satisfaction (for a lot of different reasons, including age).
I’m mostly just trying to explain all the disagree votes. I think you’ll get the most satisfying answer to your actual question by having a long chat with one of your asexual friends (as something like a control group, since the value of sex to them is always 0 anyway, so whatever their cause is for having romantic relationships is probably the kind of thing that you’re looking for here).
I think you’ll get the most satisfying answer to your actual question by having a long chat with one of your asexual friends (as something like a control group, since the value of sex to them is always 0 anyway, so whatever their cause is for having romantic relationships is probably the kind of thing that you’re looking for here).
There are a lot of replies here, so I’m not sure whether someone already mentioned this, but: I have heard anecdotally that homosexual men often have relationships which maintain the level of sex over the long term, while homosexual women often have long-term relationships which very gradually decline in frequency of sex, with barely any sex after many decades have passed (but still happily in a relationship).
This mainly argues against your model here:
This also fits with my general models of mating markets: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
It suggests instead that female sex drive naturally falls off in long-term relationships in a way that male sex drive doesn’t, with sexual attraction to a partner being a smaller factor.
Note: You can verify this is the case by filtering for male respondents with male partners and female respondents with female partners in the survey data
“I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.”
Some people enjoy attending to their partner and find meaning in emotional labor. Housing’s a lot more expensive than gifts and dates. My partner and I go 50⁄50 on expenses and chores. Some people like having long-term relationships with emotional depth. You might want to try exploring out of your bubble, especially if you life in SF, and see what some normal people (ie non-rationalists) in long term relationships have to say about it.
men are the ones who die sooner if divorced, which suggests
Causality dubious, seems much more likely on priors that men who divorced are disproportionately those with Shit Going On in their lives. That said, it is pretty plausible on priors that they’re getting a lot out of marriage.
I will also note that Aella’s relationships data is public, and has the following questions:
1. Your age? (rkkox57)
2. Which category fits you best? (4790ydl)
3. In a world where your partner was fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would you be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides your partner? (ao3mcdk)
4. In a world where you were fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would *your partner* be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides you? (wcq3vrx)
5. To get a little more specific, how long have you been in a relationship with this person? (wqx272y)
6. Which category fits your partner best? (u9jccbo)
7. Are you married to your partner? (pfqs9ad)
8. Do you have children with your partner? (qgjf1nu)
9. Have you or your partner ever cheated on each other? (hhf9b8h)
10. On average, over the last six months, about how often do you watch porn or consume erotic content for the purposes of arousal? (vnw3xxz)
11. How often do you and your partner have a fight? (x6jw4sp)
12. "It’s hard to imagine being happy without this relationship." (6u0bje)
13. "I have no secrets from my partner" (bgassjt)
14. "If my partner and I ever split up, it would be a logistical nightmare (e.g., separating house, friends) (e1claef)
15. "If my relationship ended I would be absolutely devastated" (2ytl03s)
16. "I don't really worry about other attractive people gaining too much of my partner's affection" (61m55wv)
17. "I sometimes worry that my partner will leave me for someone better" (xkjzgym)
18. "My relationship is playful" (w2uykq1)
19. "My partner an I are politically aligned" (12ycrs5)
20. "We have compatible humor" (o9empfe)
21. "The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner's" (li0toxk)
22. "The passion in this relationship is deeply intense" (gwzrhth)
23. "I share the same hobbies with my partner" (89hl8ys)
24. "My relationship causes me grief or sorrow" (rm0dtr6)
25. "If we broke up, I think I could date a higher quality person than they could" (vh27ywp)
26. "In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea" (1y6wfih)
27. "I feel like I would still be a desirable mate even if my partner left me" (qboob7y)
28. "My partner and I are sexually compatible" (9nxbebp)
29. "I often feel jealousy in my relationship" (kfcicm9)
30. "I think this relationship will last for a very long time" (ob8595u)
31. "My partner enables me to learn and grow" (e2oy448)
32. "My partner doesn't excite me" (6fcm06c)
33. "My partner doesn't sexually fulfill me" (xxf5wfc)
34. "I rely on my partner for a sense of self worth" (j0nv7n9)
35. "My partner and I handle fights well" (brtsa94)
36. "I feel confident in my relationship's ability to withstand everything life has to throw at us" (p81ekto)
37. "I sometimes fear my partner" (a21v31h)
38. "I try to stay aware of my partner's potential infidelity" (5qbgizc)
39. "I share my thoughts and opinions with my partner" (6lwugp9)
40. "This relationship is good for me" (wko8n8m)
41. "My partner takes priority over everything else in my life" (2sslsr1)
42. "We respect each other" (c39vvrk)
43. "My partner is more concerned with being right than with getting along" (rlkw670)
44. "I am more needy than my partner" (f3or362)
45. "I feel emotionally safe with my partner" (or9gg0a)
46. "I'm satisfied with our sex life" (6g14ks)
47. "My partner physically desires me" (kh7ppyp)
48. "My partner and I feel comfortable explicitly discussing our relationship on a meta level" (jrzzb06)
49. "My partner knows all my sexual fantasies" (s3cgjd2)
50. "My partner and I are intellectually matched" (ku1vm67)
51. "I am careful to maintain a personal identity separate from my partner" (u5esujt)
52. "I'm worried I'm not good enough for my partner" (45rohqq)
53. "My partner judges me" (fr4mr4a)
54. Did you answer this survey honestly/for a real partner? (7bfie2v)
55. On average, over the last six months, about how often do you and your partner have sex? (n1iblql)
56. Is the partner you just answered for, your longest romantic relationship? (zjfk3cu)
which should allow you to test a lot of your candidate answers, for example your first 3 hypotheses could be answered by looking at these:
Do you have children with your partner? (qgjf1nu)
“If my partner and I ever split up, it would be a logistical nightmare (e.g., separating house, friends) (e1claef) or 21. “The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner’s” (li0toxk)
“I feel like I would still be a desirable mate even if my partner left me” (qboob7y)
I see two explanations: the boring wholesome one and the interesting cynical one.
The wholesome one is: You’re underestimating how much other value the partner offers and how much the men care about the mostly-platonic friendship. I think that’s definitely a factor that explains some of the effect, though I don’t know how much.
The cynical one is: It’s part of the template. Men feel that are “supposed to” have wives past a certain point in their lives; that it’s their role to act. Perhaps they even feel that they are “supposed to” have wives they hate, see the cliché boomer jokes.
They don’t deviate from this template, because:
It’s just something that is largely Not Done. Plans such as “I shouldn’t get married” or “I should get a divorce” aren’t part of the hypothesis space they seriously consider.
In the Fristonian humans-are-prediction-error-minimizers frame: being married is what the person expects, so their cognition ends up pointed towards completing the pattern, one way or another. As a (controversial) comparison, we can consider serial abuse victims, which seem to somehow self-select for abusive partners despite doing everything in their conscious power to avoid them.
In your parlance: The “get married” life plan becomes the optimization target, rather than a prediction regarding how a satisfying life will look like.
More generally: Most humans most of the time are not goal-optimizers, but adaptation-executors (or perhaps homeostatic agents). So “but X isn’t conductive to making this human happier” isn’t necessarily a strong reason to expect the human not to do X.
Deviation has social costs/punishments. Being viewed as a loser, not being viewed as a reliable “family man”, etc. More subtly: this would lead to social alienation, inability to relate. Consider the cliché “I hate my wife” boomer jokes again. If everyone in your friend group is married and makes these jokes all the time, and you aren’t, that would be pretty ostracizing.
Deviation has psychological costs. Human identities (in the sense of “characters you play”) are often contextually defined. If someone spent ten years defining themselves in relation to their partner, and viewing their place in the world as part of a family unit, exiting the family unit would be fairly close to an identity death/life losing meaning. At the very least, they’d spend a fair bit of time adrift and unsure who they are/how to relate to the world anew – which means there are friction costs/usual problems with escaping a local optimum.
Not-deviation has psychological benefits. The feeling of “correctness”, coming to enjoy the emotional labor, enjoying having a dependent, etc.
I don’t know which of the two explains more of the effect. I’m somewhat suspicious of the interesting satisfyingly cynical one, simply because it’s satisfyingly cynical and this is a subject for which people often invent various satisfyingly cynical ideas. It checks out to me at the object level, but it doesn’t have to be the “real” explanation. (E. g., the “wholesome” reasons may be significant enough that most of the men wouldn’t divorce even if the template dynamics were magically removed.)
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Assuming arguendo this is true: if you care primarily about sex, hiring sex workers is orders of magnitude more efficient than marriage. Therefor the existence of a given marriage is evidence both sides get something out of it besides sex.
If both partners have an income, then living together is usually cheaper than each of them living alone, and sex is just a bonus to that. How would sex workers be the cheaper alternative?
Making no claim about the actual value of each, but can’t I counter your specific argument by saying, marriage is a socially enforced cartel for sex, and if they could do so without being punished, a lot more men would rather not get sex without getting married?
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Imagine a woman is a romantic relationship with somebody else. Are they still so great a person that you would still enjoy hanging out with them as a friend? If not that woman should not be your girlfriend. Friendship first. At least in my model romantic stuff should be stacked ontop of platonic love.
I guess I feel kind of confused by the framing of the question. I don’t have a model under which the sexual aspect of a long-term relationship typically makes up the bulk of its value to the participants. So, if a long-term relationship isn’t doing well on that front, and yet both participants keep pursuing the relationship, my first guess would be that it’s due to the value of everything that is not that. I wouldn’t particularly expect any one thing to stick out here. Maybe they have a thing where they cuddle and watch the sunrise together while they talk about their problems. Maybe they have a shared passion for arthouse films. Maybe they have so much history and such a mutually integrated life with partitioned responsibilities that learning to live alone again would be a massive labour investment, practically and emotionally. Maybe they admire each other. Probably there’s a mixture of many things like that going on. Love can be fed by many little sources.
So, this I suppose:
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
I don’t find it hard at all to see how that’d add up to something that vastly outweighs the costs, and this would be my starting guess for what’s mainly going on in most long-term relationships of this type.
Update 3 days later: apparently most people disagree strongly with
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Most people in the comments so far emphasize some kind of mysterious “relationship stuff” as upside, but my actual main update here is that most commenters probably think the typical costs are far far lower than I imagined? Unsure, maybe the “relationship stuff” is really ridiculously high value.
So I guess it’s time to get more concrete about the costs I had in mind:
A quick google search says the male is primary or exclusive breadwinner in a majority of married couples. Ass-pull number: the monetary costs alone are probably ~50% higher living costs. (Not a factor of two higher, because the living costs of two people living together are much less than double the living costs of one person. Also I’m generally considering the no-kids case here; I don’t feel as confused about couples with kids.)
I was picturing an anxious attachment style as the typical female case (without kids). That’s unpleasant on a day-to-day basis to begin with, and I expect a lack of sex tends to make it a lot worse.
Eyeballing Aella’s relationship survey data, a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more. That was somewhat-but-not-dramatically less than I previously pictured. Frequent fighting is very prototypically the sort of thing I would expect to wipe out more-than-all of the value of a relationship, and I expect it to be disproportionately bad in relationships with little sex.
Less legibly… conventional wisdom sure sounds like most married men find their wife net-stressful and unpleasant to be around a substantial portion of the time, especially in the unpleasant part of the hormonal cycle, and especially especially if they’re not having much sex. For instance, there’s a classic joke about a store salesman upselling a guy a truck, after upselling him a boat, after upselling him a tackle box, after [...] and the punchline is “No, he wasn’t looking for a fishing rod. He came in looking for tampons, and I told him ‘dude, your weekend is shot, you should go fishing!’”.
(One thing to emphasize in these: sex isn’t just a major value prop in its own right, I also expect that lots of the main costs of a relationship from the man’s perspective are mitigated a lot by sex. Like, the sex makes the female partner behave less unpleasantly for a while.)
So, next question for people who had useful responses (especially @Lucius Bushnaq and @yams): do you think the mysterious relationship stuff outweighs those kinds of costs easily in the typical case, or do you imagine the costs in the typical case are not all that high?
A quick google search says the male is primary or exclusive breadwinner in a majority of married couples. Ass-pull number: the monetary costs alone are probably ~50% higher living costs. (Not a factor of two higher, because the living costs of two people living together are much less than double the living costs of one person. Also I’m generally considering the no-kids case here; I don’t feel as confused about couples with kids.
But remember that you already conditioned on ‘married couples without kids’. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples. These properties seem like they’d be heavily anti-correlated.
In the subset of man-woman married couples without kids that get along, I wouldn’t be surprised if having a partner effectively works out to more money for both participants, because you’ve got two incomes, but less than 2x living expenses.
I was picturing an anxious attachment style as the typical female case (without kids). That’s unpleasant on a day-to-day basis to begin with, and I expect a lack of sex tends to make it a lot worse.
I am … not … picturing that as the typical case? Uh, I don’t know what to say here really. That’s just not an image that comes to mind for me when I picture ‘older hetero married couple’. Plausibly I don’t know enough normal people to have a good sense of what normal marriages are like.
Eyeballing Aella’s relationship survey data, a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more. That was somewhat-but-not-dramatically less than I previously pictured. Frequent fighting is very prototypically the sort of thing I would expect to wipe out more-than-all of the value of a relationship, and I expect it to be disproportionately bad in relationships with little sex.
I think for many of those couples that fight multiple times a month, the alternative isn’t separating and finding other, happier relationships where there are never any fights. The typical case I picture there is that the relationship has some fights because both participants aren’t that great at communicating or understanding emotions, their own or other people’s. If they separated and found new relationships, they’d get into fights in those relationships as well.
It seems to me that lots of humans are just very prone to getting into fights. With their partners, their families, their roommates etc., to the point that they have accepted having lots of fights as a basic fact of life. I don’t think the correct takeaway from that is ‘Most humans would be happier if they avoided having close relationships with other humans.’
Less legibly… conventional wisdom sure sounds like most married men find their wife net-stressful and unpleasant to be around a substantial portion of the time, especially in the unpleasant part of the hormonal cycle, and especially especially if they’re not having much sex. For instance, there’s a classic joke about a store salesman upselling a guy a truck, after upselling him a boat, after upselling him a tackle box, after [...] and the punchline is “No, he wasn’t looking for a fishing rod. He came in looking for tampons, and I told him ‘dude, your weekend is shot, you should go fishing!’”.
Conventional wisdom also has it that married people often love each other so much they would literally die for their partner. I think ‘conventional wisdom’ is just a very big tent that has room for everything under the sun. If even 5-10% of married couples have bad relationships where the partners actively dislike each other, that’d be many millions of people in the English speaking population alone. To me, that seems like more than enough people to generate a subset of well-known conventional wisdoms talking about how awful long-term relationships are.
Case in point, I feel like I hear those particular conventional wisdoms less commonly these days in the Western world. My guess is this is because long-term heterosexual marriage is no longer culturally mandatory, so there’s less unhappy couples around generating conventional wisdoms about their plight.
So, next question for people who had useful responses (especially @Lucius Bushnaq and @yams): do you think the mysterious relationship stuff outweighs those kinds of costs easily in the typical case, or do you imagine the costs in the typical case are not all that high?
So, in summary, both I think? I feel like the ‘typical’ picture of a hetero marriage you sketch is more like my picture of an ‘unusually terrible’ marriage. You condition on a bad sexual relationship and no children and the woman doesn’t earn money and the man doesn’t even like her, romantically or platonically. That subset of marriages sure sounds like it’d have a high chance of the man just walking away, barring countervailing cultural pressures. But I don’t think most marriages where the sex isn’t great are like that.
This comment gave me the information I’m looking for, so I don’t want to keep dragging people through it. Please don’t feel obligated to reply further!
That said, I did quickly look up some data on this bit:
But remember that you already conditioned on ‘married couples without kids’. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples.
… so I figured I’d drop it in the thread.
When interpreting these numbers, bear in mind that many couples with no kids probably intend to have kids in the not-too-distant future, so the discrepancy shown between “no children” and 1+ children is probably somewhat smaller than the underlying discrepancy of interest (which pushes marginally more in favor of Lucius’ guess).
Not sure how much this generalizes to everyone, but part of the story (for either the behavior or the pattern of responses to the question) might that some people are ideologically attached to believing in love: that women and men need each other as a terminal value, rather than just instrumentally using each other for resources or sex. For myself, without having any particular empirical evidence or logical counterargument to offer, the entire premise of the question just feels sad and gross. It’s like you’re telling me you don’t understand why people try to make ghosts happy. But I want ghosts to be happy.
Any suggestions for how I can better ask the question to get useful answers without apparently triggering so many people so much? In particular, if the answer is in fact “most men would be happier single but are ideologically attached to believing in love”, then I want to be able to update accordingly. And if the answer is not that, then I want to update that most men would not be happier single. With the current discussion, most of what I’ve learned is that lots of people are triggered by the question, but that doesn’t really tell me much about the underlying reality.
Track record: My own cynical take seems to be doing better with regards to not triggering people (though it’s admittedly less visible).
Any suggestions for how I can better ask the question to get useful answers without apparently triggering so many people so much?
First off, I’m kind of confused about how you didn’t see this coming. There seems to be a major “missing mood” going on in your posts on the topic – and I speak as someone who is sorta-aromantic, considers the upsides of any potential romantic relationship to have a fairly low upper bound for himself[1], and is very much willing to entertain the idea that a typical romantic relationship is a net-negative dumpster fire.
So, obvious-to-me advice: Keep a mental model of what topics are likely very sensitive and liable to trigger people, and put in tons of caveats and “yes, I know, this is very cynical, but it’s my current understanding” and “I could totally be fundamentally mistaken here”.
In particular, a generalization of an advice from here has been living in my head rent-free for years (edited/adapted):
Tips For Talking About Your Beliefs On Sensitive Topics
You want to make it clear that they’re just your current beliefs about the objective reality, and you don’t necessarily like that reality so they’re not statements about how the world ought to be, and also they’re not necessarily objectively correct and certainly aren’t all-encompassing so you’re not condemning people who have different beliefs or experiences. If you just say, “I don’t understand why people do X,” everyone will hear you as saying that everyone who does X is an untermensch who should be gutted and speared because in high-simulacrum-level environments disagreeing with people is viewed as a hostile act attempting to lower competing coalitions’ status, and failing to furiously oppose such acts will get you depowered and killed. So be sure to be extra careful by saying something like, “It is my current belief, and I mean with respect to my own beliefs about the objective reality, that a typical romantic relationship seems flawed in lots of ways, but I stress, and this is very important, that if you feel or believe differently, then that too is a valid and potentially more accurate set of beliefs, and we don’t have to OH GOD NOT THE SPEARS ARRRGHHHH!”
More concretely, here’s how I would have phrased your initial post:
Rewrite
Here’s a place where my model of the typical traditional romantic relationships seems to be missing something. I’d be interested to hear people’s takes on what it might be.
Disclaimer: I’m trying to understand the general/stereotypical case here, i. e., what often ends up happening in practice. I’m not claiming that this is how relationships ought to be like, nor that all existing relationships are like this. But on my model, most people are deeply flawed, they tend to form deeply flawed relationships, and I’d like to understand why these relationships still work out. Bottom line is, this is going to be a fairly cynical/pessimistic take (with the validity of its cynicism being something I’m willing to question).
Background claims:
My model of the stereotypical/traditional long-term monogamous hetero relationship has a lot of downsides for men. For example:
Financial costs: Up to 50% higher living costs (since in the “traditional” template, men are the breadwinners.)
Frequent, likely highly stressful, arguments. See Aella’s relationship survey data: a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more.
General need to manage/account for the partner’s emotional issues. (My current model of the “traditional” relationship assumes the anxious attachment style for the woman, which would be unpleasant to manage.)
For hetero men, consistent sexual satisfaction is a major upside offered by a relationship, providing a large fraction of the relationship-value.
A majority of traditional relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so. Evidence: Aella’s data here and here are the most legible sources I have on hand; they tell a pretty clear story where sexual satisfaction is basically binary, and a bit more than half of men are unsatisfied in relationships of 10 years (and it keeps getting worse from there). This also fits with my general models of dating: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
Taking on purely utilitarian lens, for a relationship to persist, the benefits offered by it should outweigh its costs. However, on my current model, that shouldn’t be the case for the average man. I expect the stated downsides to be quite costly, and if we remove consistent sex from the equation, the remaining value (again, for a stereotypical man) seems comparatively small.
So: Why do these relationships persist? Obviously the men might not have better relationship prospects, but they could just not have any relationship. The central question which my models don’t have a compelling answer to is: what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?
Some obvious candidate answers:
The cultural stereotypes diverge from reality in some key ways, so my model is fundamentally mistaken. E. g.:
I’m overestimating the downsides: the arguments aren’t that frequent/aren’t very stressful, female partners aren’t actually “high-maintanance”, etc.
I’m overestimating the value of sex for a typical man.
I’m underestimating how much other value relationships offers men. If so: what is that “other value”, concretely? (Note that it’d need to add up to quite a lot to outweigh the emotional and financial costs, under my current model.)
Kids. This one makes sense for those raising kids, but what about everyone else? Especially as fertility goes down.
The wide tail. There’s plenty of cases which make sense which are individually unusual—e.g. my own parents are business partners. Maybe in aggregate all these unusual cases account for the bulk.
Loneliness. Maybe most of these guys have no one else close in their life. In this case, they’d plausibly be better off if they took the effort they invested in their romantic life and redirected to friendships (probably mostly with other guys), but there’s a lot of activation energy blocking that change.
Wanting a dependent. Lots of men are pretty insecure, and having a dependent to provide for makes them feel better about themselves. This also flips the previous objection: high maintenance can be a plus if it makes a guy feel wanted/useful/valuable.
Social pressure/commitment/etc making the man stick around even though the relationship is not net positive for him.
The couple are de-facto close mostly-platonic friends, and the man wants to keep that friendship.
I’m interested in both actual data and anecdata. What am I missing here? What available evidence points strongly to some of these over others?
Obvious way to A/B test this would be to find some group of rationalist-y people who aren’t reading LW/your shortform, post my version there, and see the reactions. Not sure what that place would be. (EA forum? r/rational’s Friday Open Threads? r/slatestarcodex? Some Discord/Substack group?)
Adapting it for non-rationalist-y audiences (e. g., r/AskMen) would require more rewriting. Mainly, coating the utilitarian language in more, ahem, normie terms.
Given the choice between the best possible romantic relationship and $1m, I’d pick $1m. Absent munchkinry like “my ideal girlfriend is a genius alignment researcher on the level of von Neumann and Einstein”.
what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?
I think it’s net negative. Seen it with any combination of genders. The person who’s less happy in the relationship stays due to force of habit, fear of the unknown, and the other person giving them a precise minimum of “crumbs” to make them stay. Even a good relationship can fall into this pattern slowly, with the other person believing all along that everything is fine. And when it finally breaks (often due to some random event breaking the suspension of disbelief), the formerly unhappy person is surprised how much better things become.
An effect I noticed: Going through Aella’s correlation matrix (with poorly labeled columns sadly), a feature which strongly correlates with the length of a relationship is codependency. Plotting question 20. "The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner's" (li0toxk) assuming that’s what “codependency” refers to
The shaded region is a 95% posterior estimate for the mean of the distribution conditioned on the time-range (every 2 years) and cis-male respondents, with prior N(0,0.5).
Note also that codependency and sex satisfaction are basically uncorrelated
This shouldn’t be that surprising. Of course the longer two people are together the more their long term routines will be caught up with each other. But also this seems like a very reasonable candidate for why people will stick together even without a good sex life.
a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so.
This seems supported by the popular wisdom. Question is, how much this is about relationships and sex specifically, and how much it is just another instance of a more general “life is full of various frustrations” or “when people reach their goals, after some time they became unsatisfied again” i.e. hedonistic treadmill.
sexual satisfaction is basically binary
Is it?
most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
So, basically those women pretend to be more attracted than they are (to their partner, and probably also to themselves) in order to get married. Then they gradually stop pretending.
But why is it so important to get married (or whatever was the goal of the original pretending), but then it is no longer important to keep the marriage happy? Is that because women get whatever they want even from an unhappy marriage, and divorces are unlikely? That doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me: divorces are quite frequent, and often initiated by women.
I guess I am not sure what exactly is the women’s utility function that this model assumes.
Why don’t the men in question just leave?
Kids, not wanting to lose money in divorce, other value the partner provides, general lack of agency, hoping that the situation will magically improve… probably all of that together.
Also, it seems to me that often both partners lose value on the dating market when they start taking their relationship for granted, stop trying hard, gain weight, stop doing interesting things, and generally get older. Even if the guy is frustrated, that doesn’t automatically mean that entering the dating market again would make him happy. I imagine that many divorced men find out that an alternative to “sex once a month” could also be “sex never” (or “sex once a month, but it also takes a lot of time and effort and money”).
Worth noting that this pattern occurs among gay couples as well! (i.e. sexless long-term-relationship, where one party is unhappy about this).
I think that conflict in desires/values is inherent in all relationship, and long-term-relationships have more room for conflict because they involve a closer/longer relationship. Sex drive is a major area where partners tend to diverge especially frequently (probably just for biological reasons in het couples).
It’s not obvious to me that sex in marriages needs much special explanation beyond the above. Unless of course the confusion is just “why don’t people immediately end all relationships whenever their desires conflict with those of their counterparty”.
A general source of problems is that when people try to get a new partner, they try to be… more appealing than usual, in various ways. Which means that after the partner is secured, the behavior reverts to the norm, which is often a disappointment.
One way how people try to impress their partners is that the one with lower sexual drive pretends to be more enthusiastic about sex than they actually are in long term. So the moment one partner goes “amazing, now I finally have someone who is happy to do X every day or week”, the other partner goes “okay, now that the courtship phase is over, I guess I no longer have to do X every day or week”.
There are also specific excuses in heterosexual couples, like the girl pretending that she is actually super into doing sex whenever possible, it’s just that she is too worried about accidental pregnancy or her reputation… and when these things finally get out of the way, it turns out that it was just an excuse.
Perhaps the polyamorous people keep themselves in better shape, but I suspect that they have similar problems, only instead of “my partner no longer wants to do X” it is “my partner no longer wants to do X with me”.
I thought I would give you another causal model based on neuroscience which might help.
I think your models are missing a core biological mechanism: nervous system co-regulation.
Most analyses of relationship value focus on measurable exchanges (sex, childcare, financial support), but overlook how humans are fundamentally regulatory beings. Our nervous systems evolved to stabilize through connection with others.
When you share your life with someone, your biological systems become coupled. This creates several important values:
Your stress response systems synchronize and buffer each other. A partner’s presence literally changes how your body processes stress hormones—creating measurable physiological benefits that affect everything from immune function to sleep quality.
Your capacity to process difficult emotions expands dramatically with someone who consistently shows up for you, even without words.
Your nervous system craves predictability. A long-term partner represents a known regulatory pattern that helps maintain baseline homeostasis—creating a biological “home base” that’s deeply stabilizing.
For many men, especially those with limited other sources of deep co-regulation, these benefits may outweigh sexual dissatisfaction. Consider how many men report feeling “at peace” at home despite minimal sexual connection—their nervous systems are receiving significant regulatory benefits.
This also explains why leaving feels so threatening beyond just practical considerations. Disconnecting an integrated regulatory system that has developed over years registers in our survival-oriented brains as a fundamental threat.
This isn’t to suggest people should stay in unfulfilling relationships—rather, it helps explain why many do, and points to the importance of developing broader regulatory networks before making relationship transitions.
reading it is weird, because my model is somewhat the opposite—more women initiate divorce then men, and more women will gain from initiating it, and remain in relationships they should leave.
women make more of the housework, more of the emotional labor (the point about women require emotional work is wildly contradicting my model), more of the maintaining social ties (there are studies i read about that, and socialization reasons for that. women have more friends and more intimate friends, and a lot of men freeload on their gf friendships and have no intimate relationship that is not romantic).
it can be that both are true, and it’s not hard imagining two deeply incompatible people, when breaking up will be net-positive for both of them. but this is not my actual model, nor are the statistics i encountered—for example, that married men live longer, while married women shorter. in my model, in standard marriage, the wins-from-trade are distributed unevenly, and a lot of times the man gain and the woman lose. and all that still hold marriages is kids, and the remains of social stigma. and i know various statistics -about housework and happiness after the spouse die and life expectancy that does not contradict this model.
I also encountered a lot of anecdata that sounds like (not actual citation) “i broke up, this bf made my life so much worse” and even (not actual citation) “i divorced, and despite having to do all the work alone and not having the money he provided, i have more time, because he was so useless housework and childcare-wise, that he net-added work, and i much easier without him.”
so, like, models when marriages are net-negative for men look to me so strange, and one that i don’t know how to reconcile with so much contradicting data.
personal desire to be worthy of being an example vindicating the hope that good guys can ‘get the girl’; giving up on one means nothing will ever stay and doom is eternal
Here’s a place where I feel like my models of romantic relationships are missing something, and I’d be interested to hear peoples’ takes on what it might be.
Background claim: a majority of long-term monogamous, hetero relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so. Evidence: Aella’s data here and here are the most legible sources I have on hand; they tell a pretty clear story where sexual satisfaction is basically binary, and a bit more than half of men are unsatisfied in relationships of 10 years (and it keeps getting worse from there). This also fits with my general models of mating markets: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
What doesn’t make sense under my current models is why so many of these relationships persist. Why don’t the men in question just leave? Obviously they might not have better relationship prospects, but they could just not have any relationship. The central question which my models don’t have a compelling answer to is: what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?
Some obvious candidate answers:
Kids. This one makes sense for those raising kids, but what about everyone else? Especially as fertility goes down.
The wide tail. There’s plenty of cases which make sense which are individually unusual—e.g. my own parents are business partners. Maybe in aggregate all these unusual cases account for the bulk.
Loneliness. Maybe most of these guys have no one else close in their life. In this case, they’d plausibly be better off if they took the effort they invested in their romantic life and redirected to friendships (probably mostly with other guys), but there’s a lot of activation energy blocking that change.
Their romantic partner offering lots of value in other ways. I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor. Sure, she might be great in a lot of ways, but it’s hard for that to add up enough to outweigh the usual costs.
Wanting a dependent. Lots of men are pretty insecure, and having a dependent to provide for makes them feel better about themselves. This also flips the previous objection: high maintenance can be a plus if it makes a guy feel wanted/useful/valuable.
Social pressure/commitment/etc making the man stick around even though the relationship is not net positive for him.
The couple are de-facto close mostly-platonic friends, and the man wants to keep that friendship.
I’m interested in both actual data and anecdata. What am I missing here? What available evidence points strongly to some of these over others?
Edit-to-add: apparently lots of people are disagreeing with this, but I don’t know what specifically you all are disagreeing with, it would be much more helpful to at least highlight some specific sentence or leave a comment or something.
Ah, I think this just reads like you don’t think of romantic relationships as having any value proposition beyond the sexual, other than those you listed (which are Things but not The Thing, where The Thing is some weird discursive milieu). Also the tone you used for describing the other Things is as though they are traps that convince one, incorrectly, to ‘settle’, rather than things that could actually plausibly outweigh sexual satisfaction.
Different people place different weight on sexual satisfaction (for a lot of different reasons, including age).
I’m mostly just trying to explain all the disagree votes. I think you’ll get the most satisfying answer to your actual question by having a long chat with one of your asexual friends (as something like a control group, since the value of sex to them is always 0 anyway, so whatever their cause is for having romantic relationships is probably the kind of thing that you’re looking for here).
That’s an excellent suggestion, thanks.
There are a lot of replies here, so I’m not sure whether someone already mentioned this, but: I have heard anecdotally that homosexual men often have relationships which maintain the level of sex over the long term, while homosexual women often have long-term relationships which very gradually decline in frequency of sex, with barely any sex after many decades have passed (but still happily in a relationship).
This mainly argues against your model here:
It suggests instead that female sex drive naturally falls off in long-term relationships in a way that male sex drive doesn’t, with sexual attraction to a partner being a smaller factor.
Note: You can verify this is the case by filtering for male respondents with male partners and female respondents with female partners in the survey data
“I’m skeptical of this one because female partners are typically notoriously high maintenance in money, attention, and emotional labor.”
Some people enjoy attending to their partner and find meaning in emotional labor. Housing’s a lot more expensive than gifts and dates. My partner and I go 50⁄50 on expenses and chores. Some people like having long-term relationships with emotional depth. You might want to try exploring out of your bubble, especially if you life in SF, and see what some normal people (ie non-rationalists) in long term relationships have to say about it.
That’s the stereotype, but men are the ones who die sooner if divorced, which suggests they’re getting a lot out of marriage.
ETA: looked it up, divorced women die sooner as well, but the effect is smaller despite divorce having a bigger financial impact on women.
Causality dubious, seems much more likely on priors that men who divorced are disproportionately those with Shit Going On in their lives. That said, it is pretty plausible on priors that they’re getting a lot out of marriage.
I will also note that Aella’s relationships data is public, and has the following questions:
which should allow you to test a lot of your candidate answers, for example your first 3 hypotheses could be answered by looking at these:
Do you have children with your partner? (qgjf1nu)
“If my partner and I ever split up, it would be a logistical nightmare (e.g., separating house, friends) (e1claef) or 21. “The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner’s” (li0toxk)
“I feel like I would still be a desirable mate even if my partner left me” (qboob7y)
I see two explanations: the boring wholesome one and the interesting cynical one.
The wholesome one is: You’re underestimating how much other value the partner offers and how much the men care about the mostly-platonic friendship. I think that’s definitely a factor that explains some of the effect, though I don’t know how much.
The cynical one is: It’s part of the template. Men feel that are “supposed to” have wives past a certain point in their lives; that it’s their role to act. Perhaps they even feel that they are “supposed to” have wives they hate, see the cliché boomer jokes.
They don’t deviate from this template, because:
It’s just something that is largely Not Done. Plans such as “I shouldn’t get married” or “I should get a divorce” aren’t part of the hypothesis space they seriously consider.
In the Fristonian humans-are-prediction-error-minimizers frame: being married is what the person expects, so their cognition ends up pointed towards completing the pattern, one way or another. As a (controversial) comparison, we can consider serial abuse victims, which seem to somehow self-select for abusive partners despite doing everything in their conscious power to avoid them.
In your parlance: The “get married” life plan becomes the optimization target, rather than a prediction regarding how a satisfying life will look like.
More generally: Most humans most of the time are not goal-optimizers, but adaptation-executors (or perhaps homeostatic agents). So “but X isn’t conductive to making this human happier” isn’t necessarily a strong reason to expect the human not to do X.
Deviation has social costs/punishments. Being viewed as a loser, not being viewed as a reliable “family man”, etc. More subtly: this would lead to social alienation, inability to relate. Consider the cliché “I hate my wife” boomer jokes again. If everyone in your friend group is married and makes these jokes all the time, and you aren’t, that would be pretty ostracizing.
Deviation has psychological costs. Human identities (in the sense of “characters you play”) are often contextually defined. If someone spent ten years defining themselves in relation to their partner, and viewing their place in the world as part of a family unit, exiting the family unit would be fairly close to an identity death/life losing meaning. At the very least, they’d spend a fair bit of time adrift and unsure who they are/how to relate to the world anew – which means there are friction costs/usual problems with escaping a local optimum.
Not-deviation has psychological benefits. The feeling of “correctness”, coming to enjoy the emotional labor, enjoying having a dependent, etc.
I don’t know which of the two explains more of the effect. I’m somewhat suspicious of the interesting satisfyingly cynical one, simply because it’s satisfyingly cynical and this is a subject for which people often invent various satisfyingly cynical ideas. It checks out to me at the object level, but it doesn’t have to be the “real” explanation. (E. g., the “wholesome” reasons may be significant enough that most of the men wouldn’t divorce even if the template dynamics were magically removed.)
it’s the mystery of love, John
Assuming arguendo this is true: if you care primarily about sex, hiring sex workers is orders of magnitude more efficient than marriage. Therefor the existence of a given marriage is evidence both sides get something out of it besides sex.
If both partners have an income, then living together is usually cheaper than each of them living alone, and sex is just a bonus to that. How would sex workers be the cheaper alternative?
Possibly true if one size has zero income.
Making no claim about the actual value of each, but can’t I counter your specific argument by saying, marriage is a socially enforced cartel for sex, and if they could do so without being punished, a lot more men would rather not get sex without getting married?
Imagine a woman is a romantic relationship with somebody else. Are they still so great a person that you would still enjoy hanging out with them as a friend? If not that woman should not be your girlfriend. Friendship first. At least in my model romantic stuff should be stacked ontop of platonic love.
This data seems to be for sexual satisfaction rather than romantic satisfaction or general relationship satisfaction.
Yes, the question is what value-proposition accounts for the romantic or general relationship satisfaction.
Relationship … stuff?
I guess I feel kind of confused by the framing of the question. I don’t have a model under which the sexual aspect of a long-term relationship typically makes up the bulk of its value to the participants. So, if a long-term relationship isn’t doing well on that front, and yet both participants keep pursuing the relationship, my first guess would be that it’s due to the value of everything that is not that. I wouldn’t particularly expect any one thing to stick out here. Maybe they have a thing where they cuddle and watch the sunrise together while they talk about their problems. Maybe they have a shared passion for arthouse films. Maybe they have so much history and such a mutually integrated life with partitioned responsibilities that learning to live alone again would be a massive labour investment, practically and emotionally. Maybe they admire each other. Probably there’s a mixture of many things like that going on. Love can be fed by many little sources.
So, this I suppose:
I don’t find it hard at all to see how that’d add up to something that vastly outweighs the costs, and this would be my starting guess for what’s mainly going on in most long-term relationships of this type.
Update 3 days later: apparently most people disagree strongly with
Most people in the comments so far emphasize some kind of mysterious “relationship stuff” as upside, but my actual main update here is that most commenters probably think the typical costs are far far lower than I imagined? Unsure, maybe the “relationship stuff” is really ridiculously high value.
So I guess it’s time to get more concrete about the costs I had in mind:
A quick google search says the male is primary or exclusive breadwinner in a majority of married couples. Ass-pull number: the monetary costs alone are probably ~50% higher living costs. (Not a factor of two higher, because the living costs of two people living together are much less than double the living costs of one person. Also I’m generally considering the no-kids case here; I don’t feel as confused about couples with kids.)
I was picturing an anxious attachment style as the typical female case (without kids). That’s unpleasant on a day-to-day basis to begin with, and I expect a lack of sex tends to make it a lot worse.
Eyeballing Aella’s relationship survey data, a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more. That was somewhat-but-not-dramatically less than I previously pictured. Frequent fighting is very prototypically the sort of thing I would expect to wipe out more-than-all of the value of a relationship, and I expect it to be disproportionately bad in relationships with little sex.
Less legibly… conventional wisdom sure sounds like most married men find their wife net-stressful and unpleasant to be around a substantial portion of the time, especially in the unpleasant part of the hormonal cycle, and especially especially if they’re not having much sex. For instance, there’s a classic joke about a store salesman upselling a guy a truck, after upselling him a boat, after upselling him a tackle box, after [...] and the punchline is “No, he wasn’t looking for a fishing rod. He came in looking for tampons, and I told him ‘dude, your weekend is shot, you should go fishing!’”.
(One thing to emphasize in these: sex isn’t just a major value prop in its own right, I also expect that lots of the main costs of a relationship from the man’s perspective are mitigated a lot by sex. Like, the sex makes the female partner behave less unpleasantly for a while.)
So, next question for people who had useful responses (especially @Lucius Bushnaq and @yams): do you think the mysterious relationship stuff outweighs those kinds of costs easily in the typical case, or do you imagine the costs in the typical case are not all that high?
But remember that you already conditioned on ‘married couples without kids’. My guess would be that in the subset of man-woman married couples without kids, the man being the exclusive breadwinner is a lot less common than in the set of all man-woman married couples. These properties seem like they’d be heavily anti-correlated.
In the subset of man-woman married couples without kids that get along, I wouldn’t be surprised if having a partner effectively works out to more money for both participants, because you’ve got two incomes, but less than 2x living expenses.
I am … not … picturing that as the typical case? Uh, I don’t know what to say here really. That’s just not an image that comes to mind for me when I picture ‘older hetero married couple’. Plausibly I don’t know enough normal people to have a good sense of what normal marriages are like.
I think for many of those couples that fight multiple times a month, the alternative isn’t separating and finding other, happier relationships where there are never any fights. The typical case I picture there is that the relationship has some fights because both participants aren’t that great at communicating or understanding emotions, their own or other people’s. If they separated and found new relationships, they’d get into fights in those relationships as well.
It seems to me that lots of humans are just very prone to getting into fights. With their partners, their families, their roommates etc., to the point that they have accepted having lots of fights as a basic fact of life. I don’t think the correct takeaway from that is ‘Most humans would be happier if they avoided having close relationships with other humans.’
Conventional wisdom also has it that married people often love each other so much they would literally die for their partner. I think ‘conventional wisdom’ is just a very big tent that has room for everything under the sun. If even 5-10% of married couples have bad relationships where the partners actively dislike each other, that’d be many millions of people in the English speaking population alone. To me, that seems like more than enough people to generate a subset of well-known conventional wisdoms talking about how awful long-term relationships are.
Case in point, I feel like I hear those particular conventional wisdoms less commonly these days in the Western world. My guess is this is because long-term heterosexual marriage is no longer culturally mandatory, so there’s less unhappy couples around generating conventional wisdoms about their plight.
So, in summary, both I think? I feel like the ‘typical’ picture of a hetero marriage you sketch is more like my picture of an ‘unusually terrible’ marriage. You condition on a bad sexual relationship and no children and the woman doesn’t earn money and the man doesn’t even like her, romantically or platonically. That subset of marriages sure sounds like it’d have a high chance of the man just walking away, barring countervailing cultural pressures. But I don’t think most marriages where the sex isn’t great are like that.
This comment gave me the information I’m looking for, so I don’t want to keep dragging people through it. Please don’t feel obligated to reply further!
That said, I did quickly look up some data on this bit:
… so I figured I’d drop it in the thread.
When interpreting these numbers, bear in mind that many couples with no kids probably intend to have kids in the not-too-distant future, so the discrepancy shown between “no children” and 1+ children is probably somewhat smaller than the underlying discrepancy of interest (which pushes marginally more in favor of Lucius’ guess).
Big thank you for responding, this was very helpful.
Not sure how much this generalizes to everyone, but part of the story (for either the behavior or the pattern of responses to the question) might that some people are ideologically attached to believing in love: that women and men need each other as a terminal value, rather than just instrumentally using each other for resources or sex. For myself, without having any particular empirical evidence or logical counterargument to offer, the entire premise of the question just feels sad and gross. It’s like you’re telling me you don’t understand why people try to make ghosts happy. But I want ghosts to be happy.
That is useful, thanks.
Any suggestions for how I can better ask the question to get useful answers without apparently triggering so many people so much? In particular, if the answer is in fact “most men would be happier single but are ideologically attached to believing in love”, then I want to be able to update accordingly. And if the answer is not that, then I want to update that most men would not be happier single. With the current discussion, most of what I’ve learned is that lots of people are triggered by the question, but that doesn’t really tell me much about the underlying reality.
Track record: My own cynical take seems to be doing better with regards to not triggering people (though it’s admittedly less visible).
First off, I’m kind of confused about how you didn’t see this coming. There seems to be a major “missing mood” going on in your posts on the topic – and I speak as someone who is sorta-aromantic, considers the upsides of any potential romantic relationship to have a fairly low upper bound for himself[1], and is very much willing to entertain the idea that a typical romantic relationship is a net-negative dumpster fire.
So, obvious-to-me advice: Keep a mental model of what topics are likely very sensitive and liable to trigger people, and put in tons of caveats and “yes, I know, this is very cynical, but it’s my current understanding” and “I could totally be fundamentally mistaken here”.
In particular, a generalization of an advice from here has been living in my head rent-free for years (edited/adapted):
More concretely, here’s how I would have phrased your initial post:
Rewrite
Here’s a place where my model of the typical traditional romantic relationships seems to be missing something. I’d be interested to hear people’s takes on what it might be.
Disclaimer: I’m trying to understand the general/stereotypical case here, i. e., what often ends up happening in practice. I’m not claiming that this is how relationships ought to be like, nor that all existing relationships are like this. But on my model, most people are deeply flawed, they tend to form deeply flawed relationships, and I’d like to understand why these relationships still work out. Bottom line is, this is going to be a fairly cynical/pessimistic take (with the validity of its cynicism being something I’m willing to question).
Background claims:
My model of the stereotypical/traditional long-term monogamous hetero relationship has a lot of downsides for men. For example:
Financial costs: Up to 50% higher living costs (since in the “traditional” template, men are the breadwinners.)
Frequent, likely highly stressful, arguments. See Aella’s relationship survey data: a bit less than a third of respondents in 10-year relationships reported fighting multiple times a month or more.
General need to manage/account for the partner’s emotional issues. (My current model of the “traditional” relationship assumes the anxious attachment style for the woman, which would be unpleasant to manage.)
For hetero men, consistent sexual satisfaction is a major upside offered by a relationship, providing a large fraction of the relationship-value.
A majority of traditional relationships are sexually unsatisfying for the man after a decade or so. Evidence: Aella’s data here and here are the most legible sources I have on hand; they tell a pretty clear story where sexual satisfaction is basically binary, and a bit more than half of men are unsatisfied in relationships of 10 years (and it keeps getting worse from there). This also fits with my general models of dating: women usually find the large majority of men sexually unattractive, most women eventually settle on a guy they don’t find all that sexually attractive, so it should not be surprising if that relationship ends up with very little sex after a few years.
Taking on purely utilitarian lens, for a relationship to persist, the benefits offered by it should outweigh its costs. However, on my current model, that shouldn’t be the case for the average man. I expect the stated downsides to be quite costly, and if we remove consistent sex from the equation, the remaining value (again, for a stereotypical man) seems comparatively small.
So: Why do these relationships persist? Obviously the men might not have better relationship prospects, but they could just not have any relationship. The central question which my models don’t have a compelling answer to is: what is making these relationships net positive value for the men, relative to not having a romantic relationship at all?
Some obvious candidate answers:
The cultural stereotypes diverge from reality in some key ways, so my model is fundamentally mistaken. E. g.:
I’m overestimating the downsides: the arguments aren’t that frequent/aren’t very stressful, female partners aren’t actually “high-maintanance”, etc.
I’m overestimating the value of sex for a typical man.
I’m underestimating how much other value relationships offers men. If so: what is that “other value”, concretely? (Note that it’d need to add up to quite a lot to outweigh the emotional and financial costs, under my current model.)
Kids. This one makes sense for those raising kids, but what about everyone else? Especially as fertility goes down.
The wide tail. There’s plenty of cases which make sense which are individually unusual—e.g. my own parents are business partners. Maybe in aggregate all these unusual cases account for the bulk.
Loneliness. Maybe most of these guys have no one else close in their life. In this case, they’d plausibly be better off if they took the effort they invested in their romantic life and redirected to friendships (probably mostly with other guys), but there’s a lot of activation energy blocking that change.
Wanting a dependent. Lots of men are pretty insecure, and having a dependent to provide for makes them feel better about themselves. This also flips the previous objection: high maintenance can be a plus if it makes a guy feel wanted/useful/valuable.
Social pressure/commitment/etc making the man stick around even though the relationship is not net positive for him.
The couple are de-facto close mostly-platonic friends, and the man wants to keep that friendship.
I’m interested in both actual data and anecdata. What am I missing here? What available evidence points strongly to some of these over others?
Obvious way to A/B test this would be to find some group of rationalist-y people who aren’t reading LW/your shortform, post my version there, and see the reactions. Not sure what that place would be. (EA forum? r/rational’s Friday Open Threads? r/slatestarcodex? Some Discord/Substack group?)
Adapting it for non-rationalist-y audiences (e. g., r/AskMen) would require more rewriting. Mainly, coating the utilitarian language in more, ahem, normie terms.
Given the choice between the best possible romantic relationship and $1m, I’d pick $1m.
Absent munchkinry like “my ideal girlfriend is a genius alignment researcher on the level of von Neumann and Einstein”.I think it’s net negative. Seen it with any combination of genders. The person who’s less happy in the relationship stays due to force of habit, fear of the unknown, and the other person giving them a precise minimum of “crumbs” to make them stay. Even a good relationship can fall into this pattern slowly, with the other person believing all along that everything is fine. And when it finally breaks (often due to some random event breaking the suspension of disbelief), the formerly unhappy person is surprised how much better things become.
An effect I noticed: Going through Aella’s correlation matrix (with poorly labeled columns sadly), a feature which strongly correlates with the length of a relationship is codependency. Plotting question
20. "The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner's" (li0toxk)assuming that’s what “codependency” refers toThe shaded region is a 95% posterior estimate for the mean of the distribution conditioned on the time-range (every 2 years) and cis-male respondents, with prior N(0,0.5).
Note also that codependency and sex satisfaction are basically uncorrelated
This shouldn’t be that surprising. Of course the longer two people are together the more their long term routines will be caught up with each other. But also this seems like a very reasonable candidate for why people will stick together even without a good sex life.
This seems supported by the popular wisdom. Question is, how much this is about relationships and sex specifically, and how much it is just another instance of a more general “life is full of various frustrations” or “when people reach their goals, after some time they became unsatisfied again” i.e. hedonistic treadmill.
Is it?
So, basically those women pretend to be more attracted than they are (to their partner, and probably also to themselves) in order to get married. Then they gradually stop pretending.
But why is it so important to get married (or whatever was the goal of the original pretending), but then it is no longer important to keep the marriage happy? Is that because women get whatever they want even from an unhappy marriage, and divorces are unlikely? That doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me: divorces are quite frequent, and often initiated by women.
I guess I am not sure what exactly is the women’s utility function that this model assumes.
Kids, not wanting to lose money in divorce, other value the partner provides, general lack of agency, hoping that the situation will magically improve… probably all of that together.
Also, it seems to me that often both partners lose value on the dating market when they start taking their relationship for granted, stop trying hard, gain weight, stop doing interesting things, and generally get older. Even if the guy is frustrated, that doesn’t automatically mean that entering the dating market again would make him happy. I imagine that many divorced men find out that an alternative to “sex once a month” could also be “sex never” (or “sex once a month, but it also takes a lot of time and effort and money”).
Worth noting that this pattern occurs among gay couples as well! (i.e. sexless long-term-relationship, where one party is unhappy about this).
I think that conflict in desires/values is inherent in all relationship, and long-term-relationships have more room for conflict because they involve a closer/longer relationship. Sex drive is a major area where partners tend to diverge especially frequently (probably just for biological reasons in het couples).
It’s not obvious to me that sex in marriages needs much special explanation beyond the above. Unless of course the confusion is just “why don’t people immediately end all relationships whenever their desires conflict with those of their counterparty”.
A general source of problems is that when people try to get a new partner, they try to be… more appealing than usual, in various ways. Which means that after the partner is secured, the behavior reverts to the norm, which is often a disappointment.
One way how people try to impress their partners is that the one with lower sexual drive pretends to be more enthusiastic about sex than they actually are in long term. So the moment one partner goes “amazing, now I finally have someone who is happy to do X every day or week”, the other partner goes “okay, now that the courtship phase is over, I guess I no longer have to do X every day or week”.
There are also specific excuses in heterosexual couples, like the girl pretending that she is actually super into doing sex whenever possible, it’s just that she is too worried about accidental pregnancy or her reputation… and when these things finally get out of the way, it turns out that it was just an excuse.
Perhaps the polyamorous people keep themselves in better shape, but I suspect that they have similar problems, only instead of “my partner no longer wants to do X” it is “my partner no longer wants to do X with me”.
I thought I would give you another causal model based on neuroscience which might help.
I think your models are missing a core biological mechanism: nervous system co-regulation.
Most analyses of relationship value focus on measurable exchanges (sex, childcare, financial support), but overlook how humans are fundamentally regulatory beings. Our nervous systems evolved to stabilize through connection with others.
When you share your life with someone, your biological systems become coupled. This creates several important values:
Your stress response systems synchronize and buffer each other. A partner’s presence literally changes how your body processes stress hormones—creating measurable physiological benefits that affect everything from immune function to sleep quality.
Your capacity to process difficult emotions expands dramatically with someone who consistently shows up for you, even without words.
Your nervous system craves predictability. A long-term partner represents a known regulatory pattern that helps maintain baseline homeostasis—creating a biological “home base” that’s deeply stabilizing.
For many men, especially those with limited other sources of deep co-regulation, these benefits may outweigh sexual dissatisfaction. Consider how many men report feeling “at peace” at home despite minimal sexual connection—their nervous systems are receiving significant regulatory benefits.
This also explains why leaving feels so threatening beyond just practical considerations. Disconnecting an integrated regulatory system that has developed over years registers in our survival-oriented brains as a fundamental threat.
This isn’t to suggest people should stay in unfulfilling relationships—rather, it helps explain why many do, and points to the importance of developing broader regulatory networks before making relationship transitions.
reading it is weird, because my model is somewhat the opposite—more women initiate divorce then men, and more women will gain from initiating it, and remain in relationships they should leave.
women make more of the housework, more of the emotional labor (the point about women require emotional work is wildly contradicting my model), more of the maintaining social ties (there are studies i read about that, and socialization reasons for that. women have more friends and more intimate friends, and a lot of men freeload on their gf friendships and have no intimate relationship that is not romantic).
it can be that both are true, and it’s not hard imagining two deeply incompatible people, when breaking up will be net-positive for both of them. but this is not my actual model, nor are the statistics i encountered—for example, that married men live longer, while married women shorter. in my model, in standard marriage, the wins-from-trade are distributed unevenly, and a lot of times the man gain and the woman lose. and all that still hold marriages is kids, and the remains of social stigma. and i know various statistics -about housework and happiness after the spouse die and life expectancy that does not contradict this model.
I also encountered a lot of anecdata that sounds like (not actual citation) “i broke up, this bf made my life so much worse” and even (not actual citation) “i divorced, and despite having to do all the work alone and not having the money he provided, i have more time, because he was so useless housework and childcare-wise, that he net-added work, and i much easier without him.”
so, like, models when marriages are net-negative for men look to me so strange, and one that i don’t know how to reconcile with so much contradicting data.
An obvious answer you missed: Lacking a prenup, courts often rule in favor of the woman over the man in the case of a contested divorce.
girl prety
personal desire to be worthy of being an example vindicating the hope that good guys can ‘get the girl’; giving up on one means nothing will ever stay and doom is eternal