Do You Think The Average Person Needs A Romantic Partner To Be Happy?

Hi CanadaApple.

You've asked an interesting question, but I'm not sure how possible it is to answer it.

Everyone will have their thoughts about it, but as a sociology-type I prefer to look at what is possible to study and measure, in a social-sciencey kind of way. In other words, any conclusions from research will be about generalities and not specifics. This also means such studies will be guided by our current society's prerogatives, ie, hetereosexuality, class assumptions, race assumptions and the idea of "women and marriage", something loaded with all of that, plus sexist assumptions.

By the way, I found no articles (quick google search) that discussed "men and marriage." Not a surprise, but still.

Cohabitation also seems to be not seen as an option. Perhaps since it functions the same way as marriage does, it's the social equivalent.

So, that said, I heard of a study from years ago (sorry, no link), about happiness as connected to being married or being in a relationship, that lists the levels of happiness as follows:

From happiest to least happy:

Single women

Married men

Married women

Single men

Here's what my quick google search found:

Who's happier: Single or married women?

This article is a bit stupid, but worth a look: Are married people happier than singles?

I love how the marriage stats come from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Hee hee. But that's my bias.

My quick and dirty "happiness as related to being single or coupled assessment" goes something like this. 50% (or so) of legal marriages end in divorce. Of the remaining 50% who are married, many are miserable at a point in time where a survey might be done (even if they get divorced later). There are also many couples who stay together and are miserable unto death do them part.

This math ain't hard to do.

And finally, studies on happiness and other socially desired phenomenon are notoriously problematic because of response bias, that is, participants giving answers they think the researcher is looking for.

Thanks for starting this thread, CanadaApple. Great topic!

If it's true, I worry for humanity (well, I do anyway) because I wonder how many people actually have "romantic" partners--even those who are married! I mean, what do we mean by "romantic" anyway? Sexually attracted? Economically co-dependent? Personality affinity? Domestically cemented? Shared appreciation of rock climbing?

Humans are social creatures, right? And there are a myriad of relationships that make life better--work relationships, family relationships, romantic relationships, random relationships--and we invest and profit from in them in different ways (excuse the capitalist metaphor).

There is simply no way you could throw all your energy into a single relationship--say, a monogamous, long-term, sexual and economic pact--and it could give you everything you need to be "happy." It is not a panacea to alienation and malaise. Sure, you could find yourself in a rewarding, enjoyable relationship with a member of a gender to which you are attracted erotically, but you'd need all kinds of other relationships to coexist with that one. I know many people who get by great without a conventional romantic partnership, because they have wonderful relationships with friends, colleagues, family and even pets (maybe especially pets! I know I do...)

I mean, we also need to ask what it means to be happy, right? Is that possible in a social and economic system which strips us down to our net dollar worth and reduces human relations to an economic exchange? How can we know anyone in that context? How can we know ourselves? Just think about the pressures that make us ask the kind of question phrased in the OP: we are told, everywhere, always, that the impossible Hollywood relationship--which will fulfill us in all parts of our life--is all we need to be happy. How can we be happy, truly, when the one blueprint we're given is so obviously impossible?

In short, no. And also yes. But mostly no.

I think of "happy" as the punctuation in periods of relative satisfaction in life.  I've lived most of my adult life as a single person, but met someone special 10 years ago and married him (a big surprise for me) 4 years ago.  When I was single, I enjoyed my life.  I was social, had a decent job that I didn't hate, had creative outlets and had the love of my family, children and wonderful friends.  Being married was never on my radar and being in a long term relationship wasn't a goal for me.

What I can say is that when you share your life with someone in a romantic way, it can either be a source of stress or its opposite.  I am happily married to someone I love without reserve, but we've been through some hellish times and I think that the measure of any relationship is how it weathers life's storms. 

Is being in a romantic relationship necessary to happiness?  Hell no.  Is being in love with your best friend and having that love reciprocated a good thing?  Hell yes.

I've heard that idea, but I've considered it, but I just don't believe that romantic love is come new cultural creation.

Rumi is listed as being born in 1207, and while his love poems may have been about God (the Mystery), the richness of the language suggests to me that romantic love must've been around already then.

I don't know how old the source is for what we think of as "the Greek myths", but certainly whoever came up with them had a developed working notion of romantic love.  I think there are "beloveds" and "love potions" and "love rituals" going back several thousand years easily in Indian literature (the Vedas).

I don't think there is much pair bonding among non-human primates, and I have read theories about how pair bonding was a significant strategy in our evolution.  One wonders how this could've come about.

On the other hand, I believe I have witnessed two dogs "falling in love".  And check out this video of a leopard and tiger couple.

Did white europeans invent 'falling in love' a couple centuries ago?  What about brain chemistry?  I'm not sure it responds that quickly.

That would be where recreational drugs come in.

In related news, rats have feeings too. Awwwww.

Now that's friendship! Or love. Or something.

 

 

 

As much as I'm sure you all want me to go into a historical exposition of love poetry, starting with Ovid, I think I'll demur for the time being. But it should be obvious that what counted as love poetry to Catullus is much different than what counts as love poetry to Petrarch, Shakespeare, Keats, Eliot and Ginsberg. Not to mention Sappho, Browning, Dickinson, or Plath. So I'm definitely inclined to agree with Merowe that modernity and modernism have shattered what we used to think of as romantic and so we're in the process of writing new definitions which are just as fragile as the conventions we know.

And IIRC, Endiku was made "human" after he was seduced by a woman.

Cautionary tale to whom? Men, to beware of evil sinful lustful women? Nice, Gaian.

What year is this?

I would not DARE to write that without tongue in cheek, Maysie. There must be some tiny place for humorous treatment of that hoary old canard between the sexes? Indeed, who today could state that with a straight face except the very ugly? Does it always require this :) as a followup? Just a soupcon of space for solace? Cause I sure as shit am not going to offer an apology to those who have no space left for repartee. Not only am I not a part of "the problem," I worked beside my late partner for many years with overcoming society's sexism in mind. Find another, easier target, and some space for the not completely humourless. I did post this in the obit thread next door with empathy for her task in mind: "Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, 65, biographer, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, and Anna Freud: A Biography. Leaving a tenured professorship, she continued to write, The Anatomy of Prejudices leading to her last work, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children. She had no children of her own from a brief marriage 40 years ago and had, as the Globe's Sandra Martin tells it, " made her name writing about two other childless women, became fascinated with children through writing Anna Freud's biography, her own work as a therapist and her personal life as an aunt and a stepmother. "She came to believe that prejudice against children was intertwined with all the other prejudices she had written about, and was also embedded in the history of psychoanalysis. "Childism" will be published by Yale Press next month." She died on Dec. 1 from a pulmonary embolism after attending a Tafelmusik concert in Toronto with her partner in marriage, Christine Dunbar." Or do you suspect a Jekyl and Hyde personality at work here :) Just to be safe, another one :)

imo, i need a romantic and sexual partner in order to be happy.

 

I feel like i am undesirable when i do not have a man who want to be with me, i feel ugly, i know thats really my self esteem problem, but thats how i feel.

A successful [relationship] is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted…all leavened by the occasional orgasm. – Dan Savage

"generally, yes", in answer to the question,

but the tricky thing for me has always been, and i think is the big qualifier to the question, is that you have to be fairly happy with yourself, single, in order to be happy in a relationship.

if a relationship is a raising of something larger, something more complex than just one person, then the more autonomously stable (happy, non-dependant), each of the people, the inputs, are, the better.

of course, in a relationship you kinda pool your skills and such, so one does become "dependant" as well as stronger; but the idea is to grow something larger, not entangle you or your partner.

i've been through famine and feast, relationship-wise, and that's how it's seemed to me, anyway.

I think the average person thinks he or she needs to be coupled up to be happy. 

But the fact is that if you are in a relationship you still wind up having to deal with your own shit (on some level, anyway) just the same as before.

 

I expected that "answer".

It doesn't exactly make me happy, so I guess I have to find another answer for myself.

 

True, but it's easier said than done for some people.