Yes, human's ability to rationalize "this can't be the problem because I don't want it to be!" is pretty impressive. Part of me wonders how much humans were always like this, and we just notice it more now with social media allowing crazy to go on full display, and how much is a "Coddling of the American Mind" style teaching of young people to be crazy for the past 40-50 years. I actually kind of think it might be the latter, with the caveat that it might be cyclical and so have turned up a lot in the past, too. Perhaps our mental design lends itself to certain very common destructive tendencies if there isn't constant pressure removing them from the gene/culture pool.
"Instability" seems to be key here. So many alternative lifestyles and ways of doing things are just so intrinsically entropic. Take polyamory. People are unstable. Add another person or more to the equation, and you get more instability. More points of failure and more failure modes. So you get more failure. Not "always failure"--but "more failure."
"I think that the result is that many individual lives become chaotic. For every person who can handle occasional gambling or occasional use of marijuana, I suspect that there are many whose lives become completely disordered. For every person who benefits from a society that is more permissive toward sexual deviancy, I suspect that there are many who are hurt, especially children who do not grow up in stable families." https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/keeping-up-with-the-fits-710
I can only judge from my own experience, but for me a very traditional marriage gave me the happiest months of my life, and then more than 17 years of increasing despair, loneliness, and a longing for death.
When another woman invited me to live with her instead it felt like a great weight had been lifted and I smiled for the first time in many months.
After moving in with her I started to gain back the 50 pounds I (unintentionally) lost over the year and had moments of happiness I wished would never end.
I now live with one woman five days a week most weeks, and still with my legal wife (at her request “for the kids”) most weekends.
I’m still a very unhappy man (it’s been about 19 years since I remember thinking of myself as happy), but I’m less miserable than I was before (I cried for many hours, most days, for over a year).
Legal married monogamy was wonderful - for about eight months, and then it became a Hell of loneliness.
My legal wife is still the most beautiful woman in the world to me (“already painfully beautiful” I told her when I asked her not to get cosmetic surgery), and she loves me in her way (“acts of service” is her ‘love language’ in the Pastor Chapman scheme, unfortunately mine in “words” very closely followed by “touch” with “gifts” a distant third), but she isn’t in-love with me.
From what I’ve read (and the revealed preferences of same sex couples) compared to men women are serial (one month to two years) monogamist, while men tend to want either till death or one night.
This is a curse by cruel fate!
I do know of a few decades long happy seeming decades long monogamous couples who still seem in-love with each other, but only a few, and I greatly envy them.
Mostly monogamy looks like an ocean of very bored woman and very lonely men.
After I left her to live with another woman on a dark o’clock Monday morning when I was about to leave my wife gave me the first kiss on my lips from her in about 19 years (my last kiss on the lips was from another woman, which was the first kiss I received in 18 years), and it was with that brief kiss I learned the horrible secret about how to have a woman’s love - be with another woman.
Had I known that secret I would’ve made up affairs and told my wife about them many years ago and had gotten to feel loved by her instead of the Hell of loneliness I lived through.
I wish I was one of the blessed in a loving monogamous romantic relationship (or I wish I had never known what it had been like for some months “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a lie!), but that isn’t my fate, and from what I see most others aren’t so blessed either.
I don’t think polygamy is the path to happiness either - at least not for most men, we long for a “one” too much.
Women on the other hand seem to like best alternating polygamy and monogamy, but as monogamy has declined women report an even bigger drop in happiness than men have over the last fifty years, so who knows?
Damn man, I am really sorry to hear about all that, and glad to hear you have found something that at least kind of works for you. My heart goes out to you, and I hope the positive trajectory of late keeps going and you can get yourself back to a happy place. Loneliness is brutal, and I am glad you got out of that spot.
Yes, human's ability to rationalize "this can't be the problem because I don't want it to be!" is pretty impressive. Part of me wonders how much humans were always like this, and we just notice it more now with social media allowing crazy to go on full display, and how much is a "Coddling of the American Mind" style teaching of young people to be crazy for the past 40-50 years. I actually kind of think it might be the latter, with the caveat that it might be cyclical and so have turned up a lot in the past, too. Perhaps our mental design lends itself to certain very common destructive tendencies if there isn't constant pressure removing them from the gene/culture pool.
"Instability" seems to be key here. So many alternative lifestyles and ways of doing things are just so intrinsically entropic. Take polyamory. People are unstable. Add another person or more to the equation, and you get more instability. More points of failure and more failure modes. So you get more failure. Not "always failure"--but "more failure."
As usual, Arnold Kling is on point:
"I think that the result is that many individual lives become chaotic. For every person who can handle occasional gambling or occasional use of marijuana, I suspect that there are many whose lives become completely disordered. For every person who benefits from a society that is more permissive toward sexual deviancy, I suspect that there are many who are hurt, especially children who do not grow up in stable families." https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/keeping-up-with-the-fits-710
I can only judge from my own experience, but for me a very traditional marriage gave me the happiest months of my life, and then more than 17 years of increasing despair, loneliness, and a longing for death.
When another woman invited me to live with her instead it felt like a great weight had been lifted and I smiled for the first time in many months.
After moving in with her I started to gain back the 50 pounds I (unintentionally) lost over the year and had moments of happiness I wished would never end.
I now live with one woman five days a week most weeks, and still with my legal wife (at her request “for the kids”) most weekends.
I’m still a very unhappy man (it’s been about 19 years since I remember thinking of myself as happy), but I’m less miserable than I was before (I cried for many hours, most days, for over a year).
Legal married monogamy was wonderful - for about eight months, and then it became a Hell of loneliness.
My legal wife is still the most beautiful woman in the world to me (“already painfully beautiful” I told her when I asked her not to get cosmetic surgery), and she loves me in her way (“acts of service” is her ‘love language’ in the Pastor Chapman scheme, unfortunately mine in “words” very closely followed by “touch” with “gifts” a distant third), but she isn’t in-love with me.
From what I’ve read (and the revealed preferences of same sex couples) compared to men women are serial (one month to two years) monogamist, while men tend to want either till death or one night.
This is a curse by cruel fate!
I do know of a few decades long happy seeming decades long monogamous couples who still seem in-love with each other, but only a few, and I greatly envy them.
Mostly monogamy looks like an ocean of very bored woman and very lonely men.
After I left her to live with another woman on a dark o’clock Monday morning when I was about to leave my wife gave me the first kiss on my lips from her in about 19 years (my last kiss on the lips was from another woman, which was the first kiss I received in 18 years), and it was with that brief kiss I learned the horrible secret about how to have a woman’s love - be with another woman.
Had I known that secret I would’ve made up affairs and told my wife about them many years ago and had gotten to feel loved by her instead of the Hell of loneliness I lived through.
I wish I was one of the blessed in a loving monogamous romantic relationship (or I wish I had never known what it had been like for some months “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a lie!), but that isn’t my fate, and from what I see most others aren’t so blessed either.
I don’t think polygamy is the path to happiness either - at least not for most men, we long for a “one” too much.
Women on the other hand seem to like best alternating polygamy and monogamy, but as monogamy has declined women report an even bigger drop in happiness than men have over the last fifty years, so who knows?
Damn man, I am really sorry to hear about all that, and glad to hear you have found something that at least kind of works for you. My heart goes out to you, and I hope the positive trajectory of late keeps going and you can get yourself back to a happy place. Loneliness is brutal, and I am glad you got out of that spot.