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In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.
In short, humans weren't meant for ultra-long relationships. That's a very recent phenomenon. Couples that have 40+ year relationships are extremely rare for good reasons. Typically, the man either has a very low libido or he is seeing prostitutes or has mistresses on the side. Or he has simply learned to suppress his desires to an unnatural extent and come to terms with it.
I don't know why our culture promotes the insane idea that marriages should last forever. It's actively harmful.
This is a misunderstanding of fat tailed distributions. The mean (can't find the median) life expectancy was even worse, but this is because child mortality <5yo approached 30%. I can't find the adult mortality rate in India then (that is, the chances of dying between 15-60) but generally in history those who escaped early childood had a reasonable shot at gray hairs.
However, from evolution's perspective, it's true that the psychology of the female past the early 40s is likely pretty irrelevant. She has raised any offspring past the critical period. Maybe there is some selection effect from her acting as a wise grandmother.
Male psychology, though, remains important until old age. The male "mid life crisis" coincides with his wife's menopause, so you could infer evopsych is working specifically against lifelong monogamy.
EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing
That's a good thing. If there are five different comments pointing out the same basic, fundamental error that completely invalidates someone's conclusion, that's a sign that this person really messed up in their reasoning. It's like Twitter ratios but in Motte form.
I'll be the even more obnoxious pedant here and point out that the pedants are also wrong.
Mortality rates in the past were much higher at every age. It's not like people who survived past 5 years old went on have modern life spans. There were lots of things to trip them up. Look at the biographies of people in the pre-modern age and its littered with people who died in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.. Very few reached 80 years of age which is the expectation of people living today in the first world who don't have obvious health or lifestyle issues.
Perhaps a person who lived to 5 might have a 50% chance of living to 50 or 60. But certainly not to 70 or 80.
As I recall from the history of great thinkers (so generally people shielded from accidental death or the extravagant diets of the aristocracy) quite a lot died in their 60s. I remember this, because it's around that age when quite a fewer "healthy-living" older people I know would have died if not for modern medicine. For example, my father was never notably ill until he was in his mid-60s.
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I hate to be a still more obnoxious pedant, but I don't see anyone here claiming anything about living to the age of 70 or 80. Rather, they have said things like:
Or
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That's not true. Average lifespan was low for most of human history due to high infant mortality rates. Life expectancy at marrying age was usually a lot higher, even if short by today's standards. Most people who married stayed married for the long haul.
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This isn't the right approach to analyzing median life expectancy, because it overlooks the substantially higher rate of child mortality. In India in 1945, your life expectancy would be much higher than 36 if you survived your first three years of life. Child mortality pulls the mean life expectancy down, but also the median as well.
Upper class elderly are not at all a recent phenomenon. As one toy example, modern US Supreme Court Justices don't live significantly longer lives on average than Supreme Court Justices in the early 1800s.
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