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jajko04/03/20252 repliesview on HN

Marrying purely for "love" and ignoring core values, mindset compatibility, what they want in life and so on is a recipe for disaster, or at least some deep regrets down the line. I haven't seen nor heard about a single success story a decade or two down the line. Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives. One of reasons why marrying early is too risky - people still massively change till at least 25-30, it cal still work but chances are smaller.

Its a typical junior mistake to marry for love/lust and not think a bit on top of that, in this case I blame parents who don't have some hard talks with their kids explaining them not-so-rosy parts of adult existence. Like initial enormous physical attraction wanes over time, kids crush most of remaining, and what still remains are 2 people and how they treat relationship and each other with that lust tuned down eventually to 0, under various, often not so nice situations. But our parent's generation didn't figure it all out, in contrary the amount of actually nice relationships in higher ages ain't that high.

I didn't have such prep talk neither, nor do I know anybody who had, and had to figure it all on my own via rough trials and failures till finally figuring myself and women out, and then happy marriage (so far, hard knock on the wood). Its like expecting everybody to be sophisticated engineer, learning them to count on fingers and throwing them out and good luck, I am sure you'll figure it out eventually. Some do, some don't. Most don't I'd say.


Replies

HPsquared04/03/2025

This is the sort of thing they should teach in schools. English literature is a good venue for it.

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diggan04/03/2025

> Whom to marry is probably the most important decision in our lives.

That's putting way too much pressure on it. Find someone you feel like you could spend the rest of your life with? Marry them, see what happens. If you get a divorce, so be it, it's not the end of the world and there is plenty of others out there, even if you're "damaged goods" or whatever your worry is.

I feel like the pressure people put around marriage it what makes it so damaging in the first place, people feeling like they have to marry in the first place, or if they're married, they need to try to stick together more than some couple who isn't married, and so on.

Just make a decision and learn from your mistakes in case you fuck up, it really isn't more complicated than that.

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