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?

Quote:

In many ways, staying single makes sense, especially for women. Legally, women who choose to forgo marriage have all of the same rights married women do, aside from a few tax breaks, and personally, they're free of the stress and compromise marriage inevitably involves.

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

Quote:

But betting on marriage to bring you happiness may be a risky gamble. After all, the odds of holding on to that perfect partner forever have been whittled down to a coin flip -- about 48 percent of marriages end in divorce [source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

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.

Catchfire wrote:

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.

Great post, great subject! An intimate relationship doesn't have to give you everything, just something.

I'm thinking about modernity, how its sundered the apparently traditional institution of marraige which was what, formalized sexual pairing for the purposes of childrearing? That must go back culturally, I mean, to biological places...if birds do it...it's not even mammalian behavior ha ha...

Isn't the whole 'romantic' construct a relatively recent creation, a few centuries maybe? Before that, what? How far back is the first love poem? (And what was the object of the poet's attention?)

But doesn't a pair, a couple, realize all sorts of useful economies of scale in mundane tasks of daily life that are also compelling from a survival point of view?

Yes, I had to learn that love and friendship are a necessary pair, second time around. Spent my adolescence in the company of Bogey and Bacall, Clark and Vivien. Was warped.

CA, if it's not to be marriage but " happiness in/out of relationships. Maybe it's better to go with jusst you own personal experience?"- keep in mind that while your "experience" will mount, you should look around at the experience of the aged single, before letting life leave you in that condition. Not to be too utilitarian about it all, of course, but contentment is great. :)

p.s. It seems to me that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's life, mentioned in babble's obit thread, demonstrates the flexibility sometimes forced on us by life's "experiences" and absolutely necessary to reach anything approaching "happiness."

When a hunter - maybe someone working on his third marriage - shoots one of a pair of geese, he condemns the other to life on the edge of the flock, alone.

No, it's only Homo sapiens' hubris that allows it to make such statements about sentiments among other sentient creatures.

Catchfire wrote:

 It is not a panacea to alienation and malaise.

That would be where recreational drugs come in.

In related news, rats have feeings too. Awwwww.

Quote:

Given a choice between munching on a tasty chocolate treat or helping a fellow rat escape from a restraint, test rodents often preferred to liberate a pal in need, indicating that their empathy for others was reward enough.

.....

Researchers started by housing 30 rats together in pairs, each duo sharing the same cage for two weeks. Then, they moved them to a new cage where one rat was held in a restraining device while the other could roam free.

The free rat could see and hear his (or her - six of the rats were female) trapped buddy, and appeared more agitated while the entrapment was going on.

The door to the trapping enclosure was not easy to open, but most rats figured it out within three to seven days. Once they knew how, they went straight to the door to open it every time they were put in the cage.

To test the rats' true bond to their cagemates, researchers also ran the experiment with toys in the restraint to see if the rats would free the fake stuffed rats like they did their comrades. They did not.

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.

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

What year is this?

Maysie wrote:

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.

@ Tommy_Paine

If you haven't read DH Lawrence's "Women In Love" you should. The title is ironic, because it is in many ways more about men in love.

Catchfire wrote:

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.

Well, chronologically, you should have started with Sappho, not Ovid. Nits, nits, lovely nits.

Maysie wrote:

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.

egad.

Sounds much safer to jest in that direction. But how, really, does that differ from the standard interpretation of that apple offering. No,humourless is safe.

quote: "But these stories were created for a reason."

Absolutely. We can take that as a given. And the reason was begat in paternalism and for the purpose of control.A great excuse for laying back while the other does the work. And that's why the stories should be treated as a joke, ended with a joke, not solemn and tendentious statements about the obvious. That only leads to knotted knickers, right? Or do you imagine that you are bringing light to the darkness of this poster's being? When I say that "humourless is safe," I mean around here...while still trying desperately to maintain an edge of humour. Does that make sense to you, at all?

Gaian wrote:

The first cautionary tale.

The first time I read this remark I took it at face value, an ironic injection of levity. Perhaps not the fruit of the same train of deep thought that led to The Critique of Pure Reason but a wryly well-intentioned remark without a trace of unconsidered or overlooked sexist inflection/intent.

Reading subsequent attempts to nudge it into controversy I return to the comment and find it quite as innocuous as I did the first time. The obvious endorsement of a pre-Christian patriarchal perspective is so unmistakably contra babble values - and therefore satiric in intent - that to persevere with some simple-minded adherence to a literalist analysis is um, quite fucking small.

Honestly, people. Give it a rest already. This is like picking scabs.

Q: How many men does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Only one, but the house has to revolve around him.

.....

I leave this thread to my betters, who clearly understand sexism, intent and we're-so-beyond-that-so-we-can-mock-it-at-will "humour" far better than I.

As you were, sirs.

@Merowe, @Gaian: I took Gaian's remark as ironic as well. But I'm a white, able-bodied, heterosexual male and I'm used to my perceptions being accepted as the general social reality. Is it too much to ask that we take a minute and consider how others might take it? Especially since the only two women to post since were rather taken aback by it? Is it too much to ask that we take a moment to reconsider how our words make others--who share different lived experiences--feel? A simple: ah, sorry, I see my irony did not travel on the internet as it would have in other mediums. I see how a single throwaway sentence with no contextualizing could have been taken otherwise, but here's what I meant. It might have gone a long way. It might have even led to understanding.

I'll note that the only people "picking at scabs" are those who are still chafing from being challenged, Yea!, by a woman. The offending creature let it lie at post #19. Yet still she finds herself in the crucible. I wonder if there's any literary lesson to be learned here? Somehow I doubt it will garner the same chorus, however, of man's word scorned.

It's time to look around, folks, and see if there are any women posting here. Count how many of them are moderators or former moderators. And when the truth hits home, wonder why.

Catchfire wrote:

@Merowe, @Gaian: I took Gaian's remark as ironic as well. But I'm a white, able-bodied, heterosexual male and I'm used to my perceptions being accepted as the general social reality. Is it too much to ask that we take a minute and consider how others might take it? Especially since the only two women to post since were rather taken aback by it? Is it too much to ask that we take a moment to reconsider how our words make others--who share different lived experiences--feel? A simple: ah, sorry, I see my irony did not travel on the internet as it would have in other mediums. I see how a single throwaway sentence with no contextualizing could have been taken otherwise, but here's what I meant. It might have gone a long way. It might have even led to understanding.

I'll note that the only people "picking at scabs" are those who are still chafing from being challenged, Yea!, by a woman. The offending creature let it lie at post #19. Yet still she finds herself in the crucible. I wonder if there's any literary lesson to be learned here? Somehow I doubt it will garner the same chorus, however, of man's word scorned.

It's time to look around, folks, and see if there are any women posting here. Count how many of them are moderators or former moderators. And when the truth hits home, wonder why.

FWIW, I'll add a feminine-derived comment:  Mountain out of a molehill.  Honestly, people.  Haven't we got bigger fish to fry than worry about a tongue in cheek one-liner that was clearly ironic?

Who made it into a mountain?  Maysie wrote a short two-sentence post about it.  I wrote one, simply saying it hit me wrong too and then I moved on within the same post.  Then George went on for paragraphs about how he was not going to apologize, no, and he's being so oppressed by the humourless ballbusters at babble.  Maysie wrote another one line tongue-in-cheek post about how she doesn't expect an apology from him, and then she moved back onto topic within the same post.

Cased closed, or so one might think.

Then the guys in the thread start complaining for post after post after post about how deeply oppressed they were by our tiny little one-liner posts.  That's why I haven't bothered to come back to the thread since - it's too much of a bore now!

I think maybe there are other people who should move on, the way Maysie and I did many, many posts back.  Why is it that no one asks the guys, who have been going on and on and on about it for many posts on end, whether THEY have bigger fish to fry? 

Because we already know that the answer, of course, is no.  They don't.  It's very important to ensure that any woman who objects to a sexist one-liner (it was just a joke!  Don't you get it?  It's right up there with "I went to bed at 2 with a 10 and woke up at 10 with a 2!" Comedy gold!) regrets ever having entered into the conversation.  That's the biggest fish of all to fry.

Well, continue frying it.  I'm going to check out some other threads.  :)