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Comment by amag | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you agree with the concept but disagree with its name..

All relationships have their ups-and-downs, and there may come a time when the only thing holding it together is a promise that was made in front of other people. You may think that's a bad reason to stay together, but the fact is that that (bad) time will most likely pass and if you're still together you may very well find your way back to each other. I know my own marriage has sometimes hung by not much more than that and then we've found our way back.

Of course if a promise you make means very little to you, then so will marriage.

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> All relationships have their ups-and-downs, and there may come a time when the only thing holding it together is a promise that was made in front of other people.

Marriage is not a pre-requisite for going through the up and downs of a relationship. Normal relationships with no marriage have ups and downs too, and if there is mutual understanding and affection it will survive anyways. If it doesn't work, well, then maybe it's better to put an end to it and find a better partner?

I guess my question is, why are we putting ourselves in the corner with a contract just to force ourselves to stick around a little bit longer, since you could do that anyways without that same contract?

Maybe it's part of the human nature to go through this, to find a partner that we think will be loved forever, and then it won't work, and we learn from it, and we make more mistakes until we find the real one. Society tells you to find a life partner between a specific age range, but what if it's not true? What if you must make mistakes, you must break up with a partner, maybe only to find out that you both love each other and come back together. Maybe all of this must happen, but we are not letting it happen because of external contingencies.

In a way it seems like we are artificially containing our human nature.

So.. don't?

In most Western societies there is some degree of protection for de-facto relationships. You can always add extra protections with some form of extra legal agreement.

There's a generalized form of this called "marriage". Like most forms of legal structure that have evolved over the years (eg, land title! Employment law, etc) it has its problems but it's mostly sorta ok for most people.

But if you want to try to optimize that I don't think anyone will stop you.

Edit: There are of course some specific things (rights to children, default rights in case of a partner's death etc) which do require a marriage. You maybe able to replicate some of these things with a legal contract, but it will be a lot of work and no in anyway efficient.

Why do people ever sign contracts? Every contract is a restriction on your future courses of action. That's the point - a contract that doesn't bind you to do something in the future isn't a contract.

The reason why we've evolved contracts at all is because it changes how people behave. When people know that bad things will happen when they break a contract, they are much less likely to break the contract. That in turn lets other people trust that the events stipulated in the contract will in fact occur, even if it is against the other party's immediate self-interest, and so they can act on the assumption that that future will be true. So for example: people sign confidentiality agreements with their employers because without them, the employer isn't going to share any information that's important to the business, and without that information, you can't do your job, and if you can't do your job, your value is zero to your employer and they're not going to pay you. Knowing that they can sue you for a lot of money if you spread trade secrets around, though, they can feel reasonably secure in telling you those trade secrets. It's against your immediate self-interest to be bound by any restrictions on your freedom of speech, but it's definitely in your long-term self-interest to have a job and develop professional skills which you wouldn't otherwise have.

So it is with marriage. The reason people get married is because it changes how our spouse behaves toward us, because they know our incentives are much more in favor of remaining within the relationship, and so they're willing to invest more and sacrifice more for your benefit, because there's a reasonable assumption that it will come back around to benefit them. Sure, people can behave that way anyways - but it's often not rational to, and many people get screwed by behaving as if they are married when their spouse actually has no intention of ever marrying them.

> Marriage is not a pre-requisite for going through the up and downs of a relationship.

Never claimed as much. I said that sometimes the promise made is the thin string that holds the relationship together at that point in time. Sometimes that is all it takes.

It's the same psychological effect in play as when you declare to all your friends and family that you are on a diet. Once you've made that declaration, you'll be slightly more inclined to stick to the diet compared to just keeping it to yourself and "see how it goes". Sometimes that's all it takes to get yourself through a rough patch.

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