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Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

They should have said "don't let a bad man ruin your future," they probably had experiences limited to their own circles of men, but it was short-sighted of them to think you would be constrained to the same fate.

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Probably a good point! But how easy is it to tell good vs bad partner before taking collateral damage? Certainly it's easier to punt the issue until after you become self-sustaining, IMO

I've found the opposite to be true. It's harder to build the type of commitment necessary for a successful marriage when neither of you really needs the other one. If both of you prioritized career over family leading up to the point of marriage, that's not likely to change after you're married. This is fine (if somewhat less meaningful) as long as you both remain financially and professionally independent, but the moment one of you loses a job or faces a major life challenge that strips you of your success, the other is going to be faced with a choice of either reorienting their priorities or letting you go. Often people choose the former.

In the case of my wife and I, we built our lives together. When we met, we had little or nothing. So our priorities were never material, always each other, and everything we have is shared.

It's harder to build the type of commitment necessary for a successful marriage when neither of you really needs the other one.

In the case of my wife and I, we built our lives together.

I hope you and your wife have a long, happy marriage. But, I think you are oversimplifying by quite a lot. Needing each other is not automatically a recipe for a successful marriage.

I was married more than 20 years. I am divorced. The divorce was amicable and I have no regrets. For various reasons, I have thought about this quite a lot, and I think no matter your circumstance, finding a real meeting of the minds is a serious challenge. If two people can achieve that, I think they can be okay. If they cannot, they will not be -- regardless of whether they stay together or divorce.

Is it okay for a good man to ruin her future?

Since you know a lot about short-sightedness, can you comment on whether it's short-sighted to correct a stranger's family's advice based on your guesses of their experiences?

Re-frame the context hypothetically, using race instead of gender, and then tell me if you still feel that what you're saying is fair.

That takes a bit of work, since the context is that she's expected to marry a man, but she's not expected to marry someone of any particular race. However, in cultures where you have an expectation to marry within your race, it'd be fair. I come from one of these cultures, and I find a lot of what my family tells me about race and dating to be reprehensible, but if they were to say something like this about the race that we all are and that I'm semi-expected to marry within, it would be very different from when they stereotype other races.

How about "Don't ruin your future"? It doesn't matter what the cause is: "man", "good man", "purple man", "flesh-eating bacteria", etc.

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