Evidence please. Your idea relies heavily on the thesis that poorer people are happier and have better social relations than rich people, do you have anything not anecdotal to support that?
My experience of seeing poverty in the US is that it comes with or from a whole host of other social problems like addiction, untreated physical and mental health issues, abuse, anxiety, overcrowding, fear of violence. These co-morbid problems are not conducive to neither happiness nor strong social ties, except in an unhealthy codependent way. I do know that children who grow up in poverty (without malnutrition) have brain development issues because of all the toxic anxiety and stress they were exposed to as a child, and that these problems persist through adulthood if untreated, even if the poverty conditions are removed. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young-brain
In fact, from a precursory google search, every article I see about the neurological effects of poverty is that it increases daily experience of negative emotions, chronic pain, increases the odds of all kinds of unpleasant experiences and mental health issues, and comes with a constant sense of anxiety.
For the purposes of this post, it isn’t meaningful what state my relationship was in when it ended. Many or most people reading this will have much less peaceful break ups than I (although maybe less surprising)
I do think you’re making a lot of assumptions with this. I never said he didn’t reciprocate. I don’t require emotional support because I am very calm, as I said, with a very low neuroticism. On the other hand, I’m in the 5 percentile for conscientiousness (barely conscientious at all!), so he kept me from losing things, kept me on time, kept me on task, made sure I completed projects I cared about, did extra chores, and cleaned up after me without complaint. A healthy relationship is difficult when both partners need exactly the same amount of support in the same areas.
I actually wanted to have an open relationship several months before he requested it, but I wrote it off as an impossibility until he independently raised the possibility. I was excited about the new options, but I also became the founder of a start-up in this same time window, which is astoundingly time consuming, and this on top of a day job. Not dating wasn’t really a product of my lack of excitement about the possibilities of dating.
All that said, obviously he wasn’t happy in the relationship and it did come as a surprise at the time, so I clearly wasn’t noticing something, or noticing something and not acknowledging it. I do think our continuing friendship is something of a good sign for the overall state of the prior relationship at the time it ended though.