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Scott's most recent post had someone linking to an article in the Atlantic about debunking a study, I went and read it and got sucked into the Atlantic rabbit hole.
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Link two: The Ozempic Flip Flop as someone who gets full very quickly and doesn't have a very strong appetite, I've never really had good mental image of what it's like for normal people with normal appetites let alone obese people with obese appetites. This article in particular presents people who lost weight, noticed immediate massive benefits in their life they're desperate to keep, and yet still can't keep the weight from coming back. It is just the satiety setpoint being set so high it's torture for them to not eat to the point of overeating? I'm trying to match it to my own points of reference for "willpower" struggles but failing. I force myself to go to the gym despite not enjoying exercise, but that's forcing myself to do something, not forcing myself not to do something, so generally speaking once I overcome the activation barrier of inertia the hard part is over. I intermittently (deliberately, as opposed to non-deliberately) fast and can be hungry and craving food but to a pretty easily overcome extent. But what makes someone — who for months now has been eating much less — be unable to maintain the amount they've been eating for months but instead be compelled to keep eating more even though it's actively physically hurting them (and costing them in other ways, like socially). How much stronger incentive can you get? It makes me feel like at some level for some people food is an addictive substance like drugs. (And also still trying to understand how this gets spread — is it really hyperpalatable foods? Something else? We can watch countries become more obese... Whatever the underlying thing that makes someone susceptible to this is, it does appear to be something a country can acquire)
Your achive link isn't the full article. This one seems better?
Once again, it's remarkable all the hoops the article, or the researchers, jump through to avoid the obvious answer. People have avoidant attachment styles because our culture almost universally portrays marriage and family as an existential horror. Women fear being "trapped" in a marriage. Women's media my entire life has bent over backwards feeding women's neuroticism that every marriage is a "bad" marriage.
And on men's side, every single man has witnessed half their friends and family cut in half by divorce. Lost the house, turned into an every other weekend "dad", and a court ordered pay pig. Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges. I had a coworker arrested because his ex said he broke into her place. On a night he was on security cameras working late in the office.
Marriage has been turned into something horrific unless you literally trust the other person with your life. A gun pointed at your head 24/7, trusting the other person not to pull the trigger, and everyone has seen it. They know someone who's been shot. Probably a lot of people. And one wonders why kids who've watched this happen to their parents (or lost a parent to it) have developed an "avoidant attachment style".
I'll second the fear bit. I'm a child of divorce, my current significant other is a child of divorce. My workplace is small and not hugely representative, but I've seen more divorces happen among people working here than marriages or childbirths combined. From the numbers, just under one in three children will watch their parents divorce before they reach adulthood; one in five of all adults are divorcees.
It'd be a different matter if most of these divorces were the advert model where a deadbed room and some court hearings lead to a couple parting ways, and 'amiable' divorces do presumably exist. But I've seen maybe one, and those close I've heard about are pretty far removed.
((I haven't actually seen the weekend prison stay, though I'll admit that's probably an artifact of class-and-culture stuff. I have seen everything from 'announcing divorce with a bulk withdrawal from a shared bank account' to 'left photographic evidence of infidelity in space with the teenage kids' to 'clearly false allegations to get the significant other fired', and those are just the claims that I'm extremely confident on. Nor, to be clear, is all the bad behavior coming from women, or even relationships involving women, even in this list.))
And that's the unofficial side of things. Amadan can critique the hypothetical worst-case scenarios, and does so with cause. Alimony is rare (although I'm skeptical of the 10% number that's going around, which seems to be cited from a Marquette University game-of-telephone from a study that was hilariously limited, page 75), income-limited to (often well-)under half of income, and usually time-limited. Child support is much more common -- though not strictly tied to marriage -- but it has caps too and depends on the existence of a child. The extremely rare cases where these combine to exceed half of income usually reflect either unusual changes in employment immediate around the divorce or bizarre situations.
But the official rules, while not as bad as the hypotheticals, are still absolutely terrifying, and they often break down badly at the edges.
There's a fair argument that these are controlled (if not _well-_controlled) detonations of a relationship that was already ticking, and I've watched a few where the divorce, ugly as it was, wouldn't have been as bad as a continued marriage: in addition to the classical physical abuse or addiction, there's the schizophrenic break, the propositions to an older child, the embezzlement. Yet I've also seen a number of cases that should have fallen into the 'amicable' divorce setting, falling apart over short-term infidelity or incompatibility or differing goals, and they've included many of the worst results. I don't have to talk about what the divorcees would have done in a counterfactual or with a time machine, here; at least a couple were Borderer enough to say if their partner was gonna cheat on them they wish they could have just exchanged some hall passes... months before the divorce proceedings plummeted into child service calls and severe drug addiction, respectively. Yes, revealed preferences and all, but it's still Not Great Bob.
It's not the only cause for the collapse of relationships, or even the only cause for fear of marriage specifically, but it marrs the matter heavily.
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Yep. I'm obviously biased because I work in the system, but court is open to the public. Anyone can go hang out in misdemeanor court sometime and watch the DV cases flow through. They can watch some misdemeanor DV trials (where the defendant often does not get a jury trial, only a bench trial) where a conviction can result in all kinds of direct and collateral consequences and see what they think of the accusations and evidence. Also, they'd need to keep in mind that the trial might be many months down the road after an allegation was made, a temporary restraining order was granted on little-to-no evidence, and the man could already have been forced out of his house and kept away from his kids the whole time.
Watching in family court can also be instructive to see how many divorces have an opening salvo of vague claims of abuse and getting a temporary restraining order. 100%? Not even close, but it doesn't take long watching family court or talking to attorneys who handle divorces to Notice there's a trend there.
I have friends and family working in law enforcement and the general legal system so they talk about this stuff somewhat regularly.
Pretty unsettling, but on the other hand I don't know of anyone, at all, for whom this has happened IRL. It's like some sort of parallel horror world where people act like monsters as soon as there is a disagreement.
Perhaps it's a class thing or it's just that me and everyone around me has somehow filtered out the crazy.
That's the one. Its a class thing AND you've also filtered out crazies.
I worked as a public defender specifically on a domestic violence docket for about six months. EVERY single horror story you can think of, both in terms of loved ones beating on each other (not just spouses, mind!) and false accusations ruining lives are true, and indeed are happening daily.
Yet... I know of literally nobody in my personal circle of immediate friends and family who has had to deal with that situation.
The level of dysfunction required for someone to actually physically beat someone they care about, or to falsely accuse someone of same, is actually QUITE high. But, there's the bottom, lets call it quartile of the population in terms of impulse control who will absolutely pass that threshold at times.
So if you're drawing most of your social circle from the top two quartiles, with some dipping into the third quartile, then by sheer selection effects, you probably won't know anybody who actually ended up arrested and in court for DV-related reasons.
And be happy for that, in Florida at least the Court system is NOT optimized for helping ensure domestic tranquility, it is there to throw down barriers and inflict punishments and it is very heavy-handed when applying both, so it is a very unpleasant system to interact with whether or not you're guilty of what you've been accused of.
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This is weird, because now the link you sent doesn't show me the full article. It's been a while since I've used webarchive and maybe they've gotten worse at archiving?
You know, it might have been a fluke. I think whatever script they have to block part of the article failed to load on me one time from that snapshot of archive.org. Sometimes it's weird like that I guess.
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PMC Brit. Nobody in my social circle has been arrested for anything connected with a messy breakup, and I think this is typical for PMC Brits. There is one guy who should have been, if what his wife says is true. (I am sceptical, but she is the blood relative, so I believe her in public)
DV is pretty trashy, and taking malicious DV allegations to the police (rather than the civil courts where they are generally more lucrative) is trashier.
I repeat
So someone in your social circle has had that happen, despite your claims that nobody has.
You appear to have misinterpreted "should have been" as "was".
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I was gonna say "surely that's exaggerating" but then I remembered that I know someone who literally went through this kek
Right?! It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count".
This is an amazing "one movie two screens" moment because, TTBOMK, nobody in my circles has ever been jailed.
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I suspect a lot of people here are a third case: they don't pay a ton of attention to the private lives of other people outside of a small circle of family and friends. I could tell 5-10 stories of this type (of varying degrees, not literal jail) just from college, and plenty more from being involved in an art scene with lots of gossip. Suspect that small towns can be similar, but I'd have to hear from a ruralposter on that one.
That depends a lot on the small town. I can only remember one set of divorced parents among my childhood classmates, and still today, the town is mostly populated with functional, intact families. Most people are either middle class or have the values and traits associated with the middle class.
A friend of mine teaches third grade in a different rural community. Most years, only one or two of her students have married parents. The bulk of the parents divorced when the kids were younger, though an increasing number never married at all. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, trailer trash behavior has long since spread outside the park, and the kids pretty much all suffer from emotional and behavioral issues, which then also negatively impacts their academic performance.
I don’t think I personally know anyone who went to jail on DV charges, real or fake. She could probably list two dozen off the top of her head.
I don't mean to call small towns dysfunctional, just that one assumes people in smaller communities hear more of what the folks around are getting up to.
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I've seen in plenty in body cam videos, but the closest I have in my personal life is a great uncle who got screwed over by his ex wife. This was like 30 years ago and I hardly know this great uncle. He and his wife owned a business, she was cooking the books and ran off to a country with no extradition treaty while leaving him to face any consequences. You'd think his wife fleeing the country would be evidence that she was the one cooking the books but the cops wanted their scalp.
He spent a few years in jail, and obviously he divorced her over it.
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I literally do not know anyone who has been to jail. Or if they have, they've never told me about it. So your dichotomy isn't accurate, because I don't fall into either group.
I know lawyers who have been to jail (and I don't mean they were visiting clients). They did not go around broadcasting it. You might be surprised who has gotten to spend a night or weekend in jail without you ever knowing.
Sure, I'm not trying to say it's impossible that anyone I know has been to jail. My point is merely that if they never told me about it, then I can't possibly be classified as having mental blinders about the topic. Nor can I be classified as someone who knows someone who has been to jail on trumped-up charges, because there isn't evidence to say that. Thus, it's a false dichotomy.
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I've never seen it.
I have. My sister did this to her ex-husband, before she settled into the life of a childless lesbian.
We can't live like this.
We literally can't; we are empirically failing to reproduce.
Define "we"
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