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”.
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”.