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.)
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.)